Impeachment

Is America a Sick Country or What?

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:19:32 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted
things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President
George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember
that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when
it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting
average was pretty lousy.

According to even the Pentagon's own reckoning, for example,
probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past
eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number--probably the
majority--weren't even fighting anyone when they were captured. I'm
sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the
secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties
in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably
still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people
have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted
to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people
to get the reward money.

Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are
learning were used by our side--things that make waterboarding sound
like a walk in the park. We're now getting confirmation of things that
we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using
blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of
the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the
cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the
worst yet--the threat to kill a captive's children. And of course there
is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut
with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed
to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped
captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up
of captives who were simply killed during torture.

We've got a litany of horror and abuse here that sounds like the
worst kind of stories that used to come out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
or the Argentine Junta or Idi Amin's Uganda. About the only thing
missing is word that the military and CIA torturers were eating their
victims, or feeding them their own genitals, but who knows? Maybe we'll
get there yet. It's hard at this point to rule anything out.

What has become of the US? We started out the victims
of an attack in 2001, with the whole world rallying to our side, and
within a matter of weeks, our government, acting in our name, had
secretly embarked on a wholly unnecessary and totally criminal descent
into the barbarity of Middle Ages.

And now? The new administration has claimed to have put a stop to
the atrocities, but it remains adamant that it is not going to root out
the evil that was already done to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

President Barack Obama says he does not want to look back at any
crimes that were committed. He wants to go "forward." This is not the
voice of justice, though. This is the voice of political gutlessness
and of big power exceptionalism. The same America that demands the
prosecution of war criminals in little countries like Cambodia or
Serbia or Sudan, considers itself exempt from criminal liability for
its own crimes.

Attorney General Eric Holder says he may be ready to appoint a
prosecutor to investigate cases where CIA or private contract torturers
"overstepped" the rules set by the White House and Justice Department,
but he has said he will not allow the investigation to go beyond that
to pursue the people who enabled those acts of torture--people like
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who personally instructed
torturers in Afghanistan to "take the gloves off" in one case, or
Assistant Attorney Generals John Yoo and Jay Baybee (now a federal
judge), who ruled that anything short of the destruction of bodily
organs or of a pain level equivalent to death was okay. Nor will he
allow any investigation to look at acts of torture that were
authorized, like waterboarding, if they had the sanction of the
Bush/Cheney White House.

This position taken by the new administration should sicken us all.
Worse, it should be broadly condemned, because if the descent into
barbarity which occurred with the highest White House sanction is not
investigated thoroughly, and punished fully, there is no way we can say
it will not happen again. In fact, it's safe to say that it will happen again,
the next time another charlatan gets into office and uses fear to blind
the American people to all that is right and decent, and to the
importance of maintaining the rule of law.

I know there are terrible things happening right now which demand
our attention and action--an escalating, endless war in Afghanistan
that increasingly resembles Vietnam in 1966 or 1967, a presidential
cave-on on health care reform, a sell-out on real action against
climate change, and on and on--but this particular crime--the crime of
failing to act to punish violations of the Geneva Conventions on
treatment of prisoners of war, which is being committed today by the
Obama administration--is so obscene, so directly in our faces, and is
such a stain on the whole nation, that it demands action.

We will probably never know how many innocent lives have been
destroyed by America's eight years of officially sanctioned torture,
but we can at least see to it that the people who sanctioned it, and
not just those who engaged in it (and that goes right up through the
chain of command to the Commander in Chief and to the real power behind
the throne, Dick Cheney), are put in the dock like the criminals at
Nuremberg, to face the charge of war crimes. and crimes against
humanity.

As the citizens of what we call a democracy, we can demand nothing less.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadeelphia-area journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Judge Bybee and the Challenge of Removing a Stain on the Legal System

dlindorff — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:54:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in the state of New
York ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to
step down from his bench and leave his position following his
disbarment for allegedly “misusing” $9000 in a client’s account prior
to his election as a judge. In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced
something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been
disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for
“swindling an older woman of her house and savings” as an attorney six
years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position. Under state law
in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge
Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he
continued to collect his salary. Only the state’s Judicial Standards
Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could
remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a
similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an Appellate Judge
which began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department
of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for
the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as
waterboarding, sleep deprivation, body slamming and other measures on
captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

It is now being reported that the Justice Department is about to
release a review the department’s ethics unit, the Office of
Professional Responsibility, which will report on that memo, as well as
other memos written by Bybee’s then colleagues in the Office of Legal
Counsel, John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley University’s law
school, and Steven Bradbury, and that the report will recommend
disbarment for the three men. That would put the matter in the hands of
the states where each man is licensed to practice law—in Bybee’s case,
the state of Nevada. According to the New York Times, the 220-page
internal review of Bybee’s, Yoo’s and Bradbury’s actions as counsel to
the White House amounted to “serious lapses of judgment” that could
warrant reprimands or disbarment.

What sets Bybee apart from the other two men is that after his work
in the Bush/Cheney administration, he went on to become a federal judge
with a lifetime appointment. Furthermore, unlike North Carolina, and
many other states, there is no requirement that a federal judge have a
law degree or be a lawyer , much less be a licensed one. While every
judge on the federal bench is, in fact, a lawyer in good standing with
their state bar, technically they do not have to be.

Judges in many state courts can be removed from office by the
judicial conduct committees operated by those states’ supreme courts,
but federal judges can only be “disciplined” by the federal judicial
system’s office of judicial conduct, not removed from office. A
disciplined judge might be prevented from hearing cases or from signing
court orders, but removal from office, under the Constitution, requires
impeachment by a majority of the House of Representatives, and
conviction by a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

At the same time, it would likely be a huge embarrassment to the
judicial system if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred for ethical lapses
and for what the forthcoming Justice Department investigation is
reportedly calling “serious lapses of judgment,” and then continued to
serve as a judge in one of the second highest courts in the land.

Prof. Deborah Rhode, director of the Center for the Legal
Profession at the Stanford University School of Law, commented, “I
would imaging that anything that would be enough to disbar you would be
enough to remove you from the bench,” when asked what the impact of a
disbarment of a judge would be in the federal courts.

Certainly, if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred by the Nevada court,
there would be mounting calls for his impeachment by Congress. It is
certainly possible too, that if Bybee didn’t simply resign at that
point, the House, heavily Democratic, could initiate impeachment
proceedings and that he would be impeached, since not only would he
have been disbarred and criticized strongly by the Justice Department
Office of Professional Responsibility, but his actual memo, released by
the Obama White House, has him offering legal cover for clear
violations of the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions, to which
the US is a signatory.

Whether House prosecutors could convince all Senate Democrats, plus
independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and seven Republicans to reach
the required 67 votes needed to convict (assuming no abstentions), is
an open question.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson Law School in
San Diego, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, notes that while
the Constitution says judges may only be removed from office by the
process of impeachment, it also says: “The Judges, both of the supreme
and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.”

Bybee in his 2002 memo (actually largely written by his subordinate
at the time, John Yoo, but approved and signed by Bybee), tries to
argue that what the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code define
as torture—namely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,”—actually is
only “torture” if it is “equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death,” a patently absurd interpretation
since it would be impossible to imaging “degrading treatment” rising to
that level of pain. Bybee’s memo went on to say that even if US
personnel did actually torture a captive, it would not be a violation
of the law or the conventions if the torturer didn’t have a “specific
intent” to cause pain. Going even further, he wrote that even if the
torturer had a specific intent to cause pain, “a showing that an
individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not
produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent.”

As I wrote in an article on April 20 on my website ThisCantBeHappening.net,
Judge Bybee himself, in an opinion written in 2006, mercilessly mocked
this kind of legal sophism, saying: “The only thing we have to enforce
our judgments is the power of our words. When these words lose their
ordinary meaning—when they become so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean—we cede our own right to be taken
seriously.” (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.)

It seems clear that acting as a “mob attorney” for the White House,
artfully misinterpreting a criminal statute (Sections 2340-2340A of
title 18 of the United States Code implements the provisions of the
Geneva Conventions, making them an integral part of US law) outlawing
any form of torture in order to provide legal cover for criminal
behavior by American forces and the CIA towards captives in the “War”
on Terror would meet the definition “Bad Behavior,” warranting
impeachment.

Whether Democrats in Congress, who in recent years have
demonstrated an astonishing lack of courage and respect for the
Constitution, will rise to the occasion is another matter, especially
with a new Democratic president who has made it clear he is loath to
hold the prior administration to account for any of its crimes or
clearly unconstitutional behavior.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Torturing Judge Bybee: Make Him Eat His Own Words

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:55:49 -0400

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:

“The only thing we have to enforce our judgements is the power
of our words. When these words lose their ordinary meaning—when they
become so elastic that they may mean the opposite of what they appear
to mean—we cede our own right to be taken seriously.” (Amalgamated
Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.).

Yet causing words to become “so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean” was precisely the goal of the
48-page memo, just released by the Obama Administration, which Bybee
wrote for the Bush/Cheney White House authorizing the use of what any
ordinary person, and indeed the US Criminal Code, would define as
torture against captives held in Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and
elsewhere.

The actual Geneva Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, incorporated in 1996 by
act of Congress as a part of the US Criminal Code, Title 18, Sections
2340-2340A, is quite unambiguous in its proscription. As Bybee notes in
his memo, the Convention Against Torture defines torture as:

“…any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or
mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as
obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession,
punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is
suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a
third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind,
when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or
with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person
acting in an official capacity."

Now we know that what US CIA agents, military interrogators, and
even prison guards charged with “softening up” detainees, were doing to
captives included repeated waterboardings (over 100 times in the case
of some captives), slamming into walls while leashed to a neck
restraint, enforced sleeplessness for as long as 11 days at a time,
subjection to prolonged periods of extreme heat or cold, attacks by
dogs, being locked in a box with biting insects, etc. ad nauseum.

Yet Bybee, in his capacity as counsel to the president in the
office of the Attorney General, went to great creative lengths to make
the words in that act “elastic” to the point that they “lose their
ordinary meaning.”

For example, in his memo Bybee wrote:

“We…conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhumane or
degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite
intensity to fall within Sec. 2340A’s proscription against torture.”

Then, because he saw that that term “severe” in the statute was
problematic, Bybee went out of his way to try to make it mean something
more extreme. He found a legal case involving a hospital that was being
sued for refusing to admit an emergency medical patient, concluding
that severe pain would have to be pain “equivalent to (sic) intensity
to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ
failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”

Obviously, when someone says they have a “severe headache” or tells
the doctor that they have a “severe pain” in their lower back, they
aren’t talking about facing death, organ failure of impairment of
bodily function. They are using the word in its “ordinary meaning” to
communicate that they are hurting badly. But then Asst. Attorney
General Bybee isn’t interested in what Judge Bybee called “the ordinary
meaning” of words. He’s looking for weasel words. He’s trying to get
words to be “elastic,” and to mean “the opposite of what they appear to
mean.”

But Bybee also recognized in the event that Bush or his
subordinates were someday to be hauled before a court and prosecuted
for war crimes, he would need to offer them a second line of defense,
so, ever the good mob attorney, the future appellate court judge
offered up this beauty:

“To violate Section 2340A, the statute requires that severe
pain and suffering must be inflicted with specific intent. In order for
a defendant to have acted with specific intent, he must expressly
intend to achieve the forbidden act.”

What this means, writes Bybee, is that, “If the defendant [the
government torturer] acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was
reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would
have acted with only general intent” but not “specific intent” to cause
pain.” Put another way, he writes, “As a theoretical matter therefore,
knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not
constitute specific intent.”

How’s that for elastic? Let’s imagine a killer who fires a gun at a
victim, hitting him square between the eyes and killing him. He could
offer up the Bybee Defense, arguing that when he pointed his gun
towards the victim, at a range of 10 feet, he knew that death was
“reasonably likely” to result from his actions, “but no more.” Using
Bybee’s reasoning here, he should not be convicted, or even charged
with first-degree murder, because he lacked “specific intent” to kill.

But Bybee, noting that a jury might not buy such a line of defense,
offers up yet another rationale for torture not being torture. He
writes, in the memo:

“Furthermore, a showing that an individual acted with a good
faith belief that his conduct would not produce a result that the law
prohibits negates specific intent.”

Call this the Faith-Based No Torture Defense. According to FBNTD,
if you don’t believe you are torturing someone, you aren’t torturing
them. Here Bybee turns to case law with, not a torture case, but rather
the example of a defendant in a mail fraud trial, who successfully
argued that if he had a good faith belief that the material he was
mailing was truthful, he wasn’t guilty of mail fraud. But of course,
torture isn’t mail fraud, and the evidence of the pain and suffering
being inflicted at the hands of the torturer is right there before his
eyes, whatever he may “believe.”

Let’s face it. This word-twisting judge, sitting in his black robes
in a court that ranks just below the US Supreme Court in importance, is
a disgrace not just to the US court system, not just to the legal
profession, but to the English language.

He should not only be impeached and removed from his post by
Congress; he should be disbarred by fellow members of his legal
profession and then prosecuted as a war criminal by his former
employer, the US Dept. of Justice, for his role in authorizing and
promoting the use of torture by US military and intelligence agency
personnel. If convicted, he should be sentenced to a long term in jail,
and while confined should be forced to write 100 times a day on a
blackboard:

While Bybee himself may have never personally tortured anything but
the English language, his eventual prosecution for war crimes could be
facilitated by a little legal research he did in that same memo. For as
Bybee noted in that memo, the USA PATRIOT Act, in addition to
eviscerating much of the Bill of Rights, also amended Section 2340A of
the US law prohibiting torture to include the offense of “conspiracy to
commit torture”--and if Bybee’s memo doesn’t meet the definition of
conspiracy, I don’t know what the word conspiracy means.

Hey, I never thought I’d find myself commending the PATRIOT Act,
but here’s one little piece of it that we should not be trying to
rescind.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His most
recent book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

ImpeachBybee.org

davidswanson — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:23:00 -0400

ImpeachBybee.org

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

The New York Times finally wants somebody impeached and it's Jay Bybee.

A Spanish judge is seeking an indictment of Jay Bybee.

Jay Bybee's "legal" memos were thrown out by the Bush administration.

Jay Bybee signed memos authorizing torture.

Jay Bybee is a federal judge with a lifetime appointment.

Lawyers have been held accountable for the crime of pretending to legalize crimes before, see: US v. Joseph Altstoetter.

Any act complicit in torture is a felony under US law.

Every single crime is in the past. "Looking forward" means looking forward to a world in which abuse and criminality cannot be deterred.

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

"I was following orders" is a Nazi excuse. CIA employees are civilians and don't get orders.

"I was following lawyers' advice" could permit absolutely anything because there is nothing a lawyer cannot be paid to say is legal.

The advice came after the torture began and the torture was never limited to the approved techniques.

The memo in which Bybee claims to legalize the torture of Abu Zubaydah itself claims only to be valid if certain facts and circumstances are true, which were not.

Secret laws produced as royal decrees are not laws at all, but their drafting can be a crime, and in the case of Bybee's memos violated the Convention Against Torture.

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

We can restore power to Congress AND begin to deter future abuses through one absolutely necessary action.

Bruce Ackerman made the case very well in a Slate article called "Impeach Jay Bybee: Why should a suspected war criminal serve as a federal judge?" Ackerman wrote:

"Jay Bybee is currently sitting on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. As assistant attorney general in President George W. Bush's Justice Department, he was responsible for the notorious torture memos that enabled the excesses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other places. While John Yoo did most of the staff work for Bybee, Yoo was barely 35 years old -- and his memos showed it. They not only took extreme positions; they were legally incompetent, failing to consider many of the most obvious counterarguments. Bybee was 49. He was the grown-up, the seasoned jurist. He had been a law professor and had served as associate counsel to President Bush. When he was promoted to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, he became the final judge of legal matters within the executive branch. Yet his opinion on torture was so poorly reasoned that it was repudiated by his very conservative successor, Jack Goldsmith."

Ackerman points out that when Bybee was confirmed by the Senate, his role in promoting the use of torture and other criminal acts was not known (well, was still denied by some people), and he absurdly claimed the right to keep his work secret. When torture teammate William Haynes was later considered for a similar appointment, the widespread use of torture had become known, and the Senate rejected him. That's the same Senate, although slightly improved by recent elections, that would have to convict Bybee in an impeachment trial.

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

A lot of Americans have probably never heard of Bybee, but that may help Congress members find the nerve to impeach him. Everyone in the world had heard of Bush and Cheney. And everyone SHOULD hear about Jay Bybee. PBS's Frontline echoed a common view when it reported (before the latest memo came out, which is even worse):

"The most notorious document among the memos drafted by President Bush's legal advisers as they analyzed how far the U.S. could go to extract intelligence from those captured in the war on terror is known as the 'Bybee memo.' (PDF File) Some call it the 'torture memo.' The Aug. 1, 2002, memo, sent from Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee to Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, parsed the language of a 1994 statute that ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture and made the commitment of torture a crime. To be torture, the memo concluded, physical pain must be 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.' And inflicting that severe pain, according to the memo, must have been the 'specific intent' of the defendant to amount to a violation of the statute."

That's the part that some people have heard about. But Frontline goes on to explain:

"This very narrow definition of torture was only one part of the memo, which largely was written by Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. It also asserted that the U.S. ratification of the 1994 torture statute could be considered unconstitutional because it would interfere with the president's power as commander in chief."

Just as that memo is called the Bybee memo (there were actually three such "Bybee memos" and one "Yoo memo" that same August day) and Yoo may have played a role, Bybee almost certainly had a hand in various "Yoo memos" as well. Bybee was on the job from November 2001 to March 2003. To get the full picture of how Bybee and Yoo and their colleagues twisted our system of government beyond all recognition requires reviewing a large stack of memos. Fortunately, ProPublica has posted them all in chronological order, including what is known of memos that have not yet been released (but which President Obama could release in accord with his professed policy of openness if he chooses).

Just take a look at the memos officially attributed to Bybee, and consider whether we can maintain any sort of legitimate government without impeaching him, and whether we want him overruling decent honest judges for the next 30 years. Bybee gave President Bush, upon request, "legal opinions" that a president can ignore international laws, that laws do not apply to various groups of people, that a president can kidnap, detain, and ship off to other lands human beings with no due process, and that Congress has no power to interfere with anything a president does.

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

Congress has pretty well accepted that last point. But perhaps it is not too late for Congress to start down a path of rehabilitation by daring to interfere with the actions of a desk-chair war criminal like Jay Bybee.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has already released a report that discusses a number of Bybee's memos at length, including the two from August 1, 2002, that were known when the report came out. The committee pieces together the story well enough to make clear that these memos were requested as cover by those engaged in crimes, and that the memos were used to justify criminality. When the full Senate tries Bybee following his impeachment, these words from the committee's report may be of help:

"The other OLC opinion issued on August 1, 2002 is known commonly as the Second Bybee memo. That opinion, which responded to a request from the CIA, addressed the legality of specific interrogation tactics. While the full list of techniques remains classified, a publicly released CIA document indicates that waterboarding was among those analyzed and approved. CIA Director General Michael Hayden stated in public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 5, 2008 that waterboarding was used by the CIA. And Steven Bradbury, the current Assistant Attorney General of the OLC, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on February 14, 2008 that the CIA's use of waterboarding was 'adapted from the SERE training program.'

"Before drafting the opinions, Mr. Yoo, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the OLC, had met with Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and David Addington, Counsel to the Vice President, to discuss the subjects he intended to address in the opinions. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Yoo refused to say whether or not he ever discussed or received information about SERE techniques as the memos were being drafted. When asked whether he had discussed SERE techniques with Judge Gonzales, Mr. Addington, Mr. Yoo, Mr. Rizzo or other senior administration lawyers, DoD General Counsel Jim Haynes testified that he 'did discuss SERE techniques with other people in the administration.' NSC Legal Advisor John Bellinger said that 'some of the legal analyses of proposed interrogation techniques that were prepared by the Department of Justice… did refer to the psychological effects of resistance training.'

"In fact, Jay Bybee the Assistant Attorney General who signed the two OLC legal opinions said that he saw an assessment of the psychological effects of military resistance training in July 2002 in meetings in his office with John Yoo and two other OLC attorneys. Judge Bybee said that he used that assessment to inform the August 1, 2002 OLC legal opinion that has yet to be publicly released. Judge Bybee also recalled discussing detainee interrogations in a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft and John Yoo in late July 2002, prior to signing the OLC opinions. Mr. Bellinger, the NSC Legal Advisor, said that 'the NSC's Principals reviewed CIA's proposed program on several occasions in 2002 and 2003' and that he 'expressed concern that the proposed CIA interrogation techniques comply with applicable U.S. law, including our international obligations.'"

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

UPDATE FROM MALCOLM CHADDOCK:

VFP72 and Individuals For Justice are going to begin shifting our Thurs Accountability and Prosecution demo from the federal building to the Pioneer Courthouse, home of the 9th Circuit Court and across the street from the busiest spot in Downtown, specifically calling for Bybee's Impeachment and appointment of a special prosecutor etc. We will of course send the online traffic we get as a result to your ImpeachBybee.org site via link on our web page.

Keep up that "extremism"

mjc

Our understanding of Bybee memos got dramatically worse when, on April 16, 2009, a new one was released:

On August 1, 2002, then-Assistant Attorney General of the United States Jay Bybee sent an 18-page official memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel to the Acting General Counsel of the CIA John Rizzo. Such memos are treated as laws within our government, not opinions, not theories, not briefings, but laws. They are secret laws, but in many cases there's not much risk of us ordinary schmucks who don't know the laws violating them, at least not without also violating public laws that are tougher and more comprehensive. These secret laws tend to consist of permissions to violate the public laws in particular ways. They are crazy laws, because they advise violating the real laws and purport to serve as protection for the claim that the violator did so in "good faith." Nonetheless, they are as much laws as anything passed by Congress, if not more so, since they do not come with presidential signing statements but at most a snide remark scribbled by Donald Rumsfeld.

The secret law that Bybee sent to Rizzo was unusual in that it was a law for one particular person. It was even more specific than that. It claimed to apply to the treatment of one particular person under an elaborate set of circumstances. If the situation was altered, the law would not apply. The individual who received this personal legislative treatment may not have considered himself a lucky man, since it was 18 pages of descriptions of torture techniques that it would be "legal" to use on him. (Can't wait to get your own, right?) Curiously, the memo begins by citing the actual, real, normal, public law: "Section 2340A of title 18 of the United States Code." This is curious because for the following six years both the White House and Congress pretended there was no such law and engaged in an elaborate mating dance designed around the mythical need to create such a law anew. You'll recall Congress "banning" torture and Bush signing statementing himself the supposed right to torture anyway. All of that was theater. And during all of that theater, the people doing the torturing were concerned that they be protected, down the road, from prosecution for their violations of the actual law.

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

Section 2340A of title 18 of the U.S. Code says this: "Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life."

And 2340C adds this for the benefit of the people writing the "legal" permissions to violate it: "A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy."

And what is torture? According to 2340 it is "an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control."

And then there is Section 2441, which prescribes a fine or prison or death to any American who commits or conspires to commit a war crime, including torture or cruel or inhuman treatment. This was the section of law that caused then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to warn Bush and others that they should deny prisoners in Afghanistan the Geneva Conventions as the best defense of their own necks, advice Obama seems to have taken to heart.

Then there's the Convention Against Torture which requires criminal prosecution of "an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture" or in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." And the Geneva Conventions which ban "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture," as well as "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

Bybee had already written some personal laws for Jose Padilla, one of which included his indictment, trial, conviction, and punishment all personally performed by Bybee in the course of the memo. But this August 1, 2002, memo was a personal law for Abu Zubaydah. And part of the circumstances that made this law "legal" was a ticking time bomb:

"The interrogation team is certain he has additional information that he refuses to divulge. … Zubaydah has become accustomed to a certain level of treatment and displays no signs of willingness to disclose further information. Moreover, your intelligence indicates that there is currently a level of 'chatter' equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks."

So, under these circumstances, it turned out -- after Jay Bybee checked with the mountain top and declared his new commandments -- that you could legally slam Zubaydah against a wall. Or deprive him of sleep. Or waterboard him. You would need to soften the wall and be careful not to break his neck. You would need to have doctors on hand. You couldn't keep him from sleeping for any more than 11 days at a time. If you slapped him in the face you should be careful not to poke him in the eye. The precautions and limitations are extensive. But so are the torture techniques and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments, which would all seem to be just as degrading even if bruising and death are avoided and therefore the "law" complied with.

However, according to Bybee any torturer would be in the clear legally if they did not "expressly intend to inflict severe pain or suffering." And this could be done by "honestly believing" that there would not be severe pain or suffering, which you would have to if you believed this memo which asserted as much. An honest belief, Bybee assured the CIA, need not be reasonable. In fact "good faith may be established by, among other things, the reliance on the advice of experts." In case anyone missed the point, Bybee went on to simply state that people following his torture manual would not have the intent to inflict severe physical pain or suffering.

But here's where it gets sticky. First, the techniques authorized by this custom-made designer law, and others not authorized, were used BEFORE the law was written as well as after. So the reliance on experts wouldn't cover everybody, and therefore the group of people that Obama just promised amnesty does not include everybody. Second, according to the account that Zubaydah gave the Red Cross, the guidelines given by Bybee were followed only very loosely, with the alterations tending toward the more forceful and punishing. Third, Zubaydah apparently suffered serious injury, suggesting that he experienced severe physical pain and suffering.

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

(In fact he told the Red Cross -- and we have no other witnesses since the CIA destroyed the video tapes and isn't talking: “I was put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds caused severe pain. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to a horizontal position and the same torture carried out with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled without success to breathe. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of
my urine when under stress.”)

If that was indeed severe pain and not just a mild case of bodily collapse, was the expert relied upon not an expert and the advice therefore not a legal shield? Or is this just a case of violating the secret law, in which case is that just a case of violating the public law? Fourth, the ticking time bomb was a crock and we know now that our government obtained more useful information from its victim before torturing him than after. Does that alter the circumstances and therefore eliminate the specially designed law? Or is the bomb still magically ticking away very slowly, year after year, until we develop the patriotic courage to crush Mr. Zubaydah's testicles and finally learn the truth and save the television actress?

Sadly, Mr. Bybee may be too busy to rush to our rescue or to draft you your own personal torture law at the moment. That's because, even though his own crazy laws were discarded by Bush's Justice Department, even though Spain has been trying to indict him, even though he approved sticking Zubaydah in a small box with an insect, slamming him against a wall, and water-torturing him, Jay Bybee is serving as a federal appeals court judge in the Ninth Circuit. If we had a justice system he would be standing trial. If we had a Congress, he would be impeached.

Obama and Congress Must Act to Restore the Constitution

dlindorff — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:13:08 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The calls for a reckoning for the criminals of the Bush/Cheney
administration are growing by the day, as the final few days of the
Bush presidency tick down, and as new evidence of their crimes keep
pouring out of the deflating gas bag that was the Bush White House.

For years, the Democrats in Congress, with a few notable
exceptions, have sat on their hands, allowing the ongoing destruction
of the Constitution, of the US military, of the nation’s reputation,
and of the rule of law, as well as of the institution of Congress
itself, by a cabal of Republicans in the White House, led by Vice
President Dick Cheney, who have sought to establish an executive-led government
that answered only to itself.

Obama, running for the White House, initially talked of restoring
the constitutional order, and of prosecuting crimes where they had
occurred, much as he talked of ending the war in Iraq. But now, as he
increasingly assumes the role of President, he is backing away from
that kind of talk, with plans instead to extend the war and occupation
in Iraq for years, while actually expanding the war in Afghanistan, and
to give the outgoing administration of criminals and
Constitution-wreckers a free pass, in the name of “letting bygones be
bygones.” Ironically, he is doing this even as some in Congress,
including House Judiciary Chair John Conyers, who ducked the issue of
impeachment and sat on proposed impeachment articles against Bush and
Cheney filed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) for two critical years when
he could have ordered a formal hearing by his committee, are now
calling for a special prosecutor.

But broken promises about the war aside, Obama cannot have it both
ways. If, as he is still declaring, “no one is above the law” in
America, then it is essential that those who have committed grave
crimes must be indicted and tried for those crimes. As he takes the
oath of office on Jan. 20, Obama will swear to uphold and defend the
Constitution. That means not only defending the integrity of the
document itself, but enforcing all the laws that have been passed in
accordance with that document.

As President, Obama has no more right than did his predecessor to
pick and choose which laws to enforce. At a time when the nation’s
jails are crammed to overflowing with hundreds of thousands of people
whose crimes are as minimal as stealing CDs from a convenience store,
if President Obama and his Justice Department fail to order an
investigation into profound White House crimes like the destruction of
evidence in the Valerie Plame spy-outing case, or the investigation
into the politicalization of the appointment and firing of US
Attorneys, or of the deliberate campaign of lies to justify an
unnecessary invasion of Iraq, if they fail to investigate fully what
the president’s illegal National Security Agency wiretapping program
was really all about, if they fail to investigate the rampant fraud and
profiteering by White House-connected private contractors in the Iraq
War zone, if they fail to investigate the clear evidence of White House
efforts to undermine fair elections in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008, if
they fail to prosecute the White House, right up to the offices of Vice
President and President, for authorizing, directing and then covering
up evidence of systematic torture of captives in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and in the so-called “war” on terror, if they don’t
investigate what the administration really knew and what it covered up
in the days and weeks before the 9-11 attacks in 2001, it will no
longer be possible to say, with a straight face, that in America
everyone is equal under the law.

But that is only part of it.

Many of the current administration’s “crimes” are not statutory
violations. They are so called “high crimes” as defined by the
Founders. That is to say they are abuses of power that threaten the
nation’s very essense. They are not crimes in the sense that they
violate a law, but, even more seriously, they undermine our political
system and consequently threaten the very continued existence of our
free and democratic society.

The appropriate remedy for these high crimes—things like Bush’s
refusal, expressed through signing statements, to enact or envorce laws
or parts of laws duly passed by the Congress, his and Vice President
Cheney’s refusals to comply with Congressional subpoenas, his lies to
Congress regarding the true situation regarding the alleged threat
posed by Iraq in 2002 and 2003, and his overall assertion of “unitary
executive” power as commander in chief—was impeachment, but with Bush
and Cheney about to leave office, that is probably a lost cause.
(Certainly the two men could still be impeached, as impeachment itself
does not require that the impeached party still be in office, and the
potential penalty for conviction of an impeachable offence, besides
removal from office, also can include a permanent ban on holding any
future public office—an important sanction for the historical record.)
But here Obama—and the Democratic Congress--could act creatively, for
example by ordering the creation of a commission of inquiry to
investigate and condemn such constitutional undermining. By compelling
the testimony of witnesses under oath, it is possible that actual
punishable crimes such as contempt or perjury could still be committed
by White House officials and even by Bush and Cheney, but more
importantly, the nature of these crimes would be publicly exposed and
condemned, so that it would be far less likely that any future
administration would again commit them.

Obama should also act unilaterally to undo as much of the damage as
possible—for example revoking all unconstitutional presidential signing
statements from the Bush/Cheney years, and canceling all
unconstitutional Executive Orders, such as those authorizing torture
and extraordinary rendition programs.

The time is right for these actions. The public is almost uniformly
angry at the outgoing administration, which is walking away from office
leaving the nation a smoking ruin. Contrary to what Obama and his
advisers and the pathetic leadership in both houses of Congress seem to
think, the American public doesn’t want them to simply “move forward.”
Sure we want action to fix the wrecked economy, and to get all the
troops safely back home, but we also way the country put back together,
and we want those who wrecked the place to pay for the damage they’ve
done.

Few Americans would be dismayed to see Bush and Cheney squirming in the dock. Most would, in fact, be cheering and jeering.

The time has come for the newly empowered Democratic government in
Washington to stand up proudly and unambiguously for the Constitution
and the rule of law, and to prove that the phrase “No one is above the
law” isn’t just, as Bush’s hack lawyer Alberto Gonzales once said of
the Geneva Conventions, a “quaint historical artifact.”
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. 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

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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

Pelosi Confesses Knowing the Truth About Bush's War Based on Lies: "I don't know what could have been done..." Tell her!

Chip — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:38:56 -0400

Begins at 4:51.

Q: If you were to go back and change anything from your political career, what would it be?

A: Well, of course, the biggest disappointment for me is that we are still in this war in Iraq, and, ah, I had always thought at the time that, that, ah, people knew the truth they would not vote for this war and, I don't know what else, er, not have been supportive of this, I don't know what else we could have done, ah, but this has been the most damaging to us: loss of life, over 4,000, tens of thousands injured, many thousands of them permanently, cost in dollars, which is small compared to the loss of life and limb but the cost in dollars to the tune of trillions of dollars, the cost of reputation in the world, the cost in our military readiness, our capabi...eroding our...undermining our military capability to protect our interests wherever they are threatened, undermining our ability to fight the real war on terror which is in Afghanistan, uh, I don't know what else could have been done, ah, but I keep revisiting that every step of the way to think what could we have done to stop this President from taking us into a war on the basis of a false premise, without the proper preparation of our troops, without a plan for success, a strategy to leave, ah, that is where we have been for more than 2 years, we're there 2 years longer than we were in World War II.

Pelosi Video Contest Award Winner #1

Bob Fertik — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:37:58 -0400

Note: Our first $1,000 award in our Pelosi Video Contest goes to Anthony from We Are Change Ohio for his outstanding effort to get an answer from Speaker Pelosi! Andrew writes:

I confronted Nancy Pelosi with the full articles of Impeachment. The crimes were highlighted. I have the full details of the confrontation in my video.
It was extremely difficult to not only record the confrontation fully, but also to bring her the articles because security wasn't allowing any cameras or allowing anyone to bring anything to her other than her book. So I literally had to sneak all this by.
I maintained integrity by remaining polite and trying to get a response out of her without getting aggressive like other have been. I kept my confrontation on the point and not only did I confront her with this but I got two responses.
I got her to admit that she hasn't read the articles of impeachment and when I mentioned that all the crimes that Bush has done like eviscerating the Constitution she replied "that's terrible".
Unfortunately I was only able to get audio but I still have the footage in its original form on my camera intact. I hope this is the answer you folks were looking for and I did my best. She hasn't read the articles of impeachment and the crimes listed in the articles are "terrible" according to her.

The Pelosi Video Contest remains open so we encourage everyone to keep trying to get a substantive answer from Pelosi to our question: Of the 36 detailed Articles of Impeachment introduced by Dennis Kucinich, do you consider any to be crimes? If yes, which? If no, why not - and what (if anything) would you consider an impeachable offense?

Shoot Your Friends First: The Cheney Doctrine

dlindorff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:28:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

Besides, Cheney is in good company in this kind of thinking. We know
from reports of the meeting filed by British intelligence that
President Bush engaged in the same kind of thing when he was having
trouble getting the country and the rest of the civilized world behind
his and Cheney’s plan to attack Iraq. It was disclosed years later that
in early 2003, Bush suggested to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US
could paint a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and fly it over sensitive
parts of Iraqi airspace, so that Saddam Hussein would order it show
down. That, he argued, would anger enough UN member states to win a
security resolution to support a war on Iraq, and failing that, would
give the US an excuse to go in on its own. Blair was reportedly
horrified at this kind of kamikaze thinking—but not horrified enough to
expose the president as a nutcase.

So that’s where we are today folks. A president and a vice president
who both think that it’s a great idea to either send some of your own
troops under false flags into harm’s way to get shot at so you can
start a war, or, even worse, to dress up some of your soldiers as the
enemy you want to go after, and have them open fire on your own guys so
that you can claim you were attacked, and then go to war.

Who gets tricked by all these mad schemes?

Not the Iranians, or in the earlier instance, the Iraqis. They know
they aren’t attacking American forces. No. It’s us, the American
people, who are being tricked. Cheney knows that most Americans think
the idea of attacking Iran—especially when we’re five years into an
interminable war in Iraq and seven years into another war in
Afghanistan, neither of which has an end in sight—is really, really
stupid. So they’re trying to think up a way to trick us into supporting
doing such a stupid thing. And the only thing they can come up with to
overcome our reticence is making us think that our guys are being
attacked.

Now let me say that I’ve been a skeptic about people who claim the
9-11 attacks were an “inside job”—that the US government actually
organized those attacks. I know all the arguments and evidence, but it
always seemed to me that it was over the top to think that our leaders
would try to deliberately kill Americans in order to achieve some
policy goal. And yet, here we have Dick Cheney, the real brains (such
as they are) behind the Bush administration, discussing a plan, using
American forces, to fake an attack on other American forces.

It makes me wonder whether maybe Cheney deliberately shot his friend
Harry Whittington, either to flush those damned elusive quail he was
after, or so that he could generate public sympathy for the embattled
President Bush. And it even makes me wonder whether crazy Dick actually
did have a hand in bringing down those Twin Towers. He may be too
stupid to pull something like that off, but he has made it clear that
it isn’t moral scruples that would prevent him from doing such a
monstrous thing.

As ludicrous, pathetic and outrageous as this administration is, we
need to take this latest Hersh report seriously. It seems clear that
Cheney has a predilection for using fratricide to achieve his nefarious
ends.

It’s one thing when he does it with his own rifle, though. It’s
another when he does it with the world’s most mighty military machine.
______________________

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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