But the problem with Rove’s account is that not only did Bush oversee the twisting of intelligence to justify invading Iraq in March 2003 but he subsequently lied – and lied repeatedly – about how Iraq had responded to United Nations inspection demands.
So, while it may be impossible to say for certain what Bush believed [...]
These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.
Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t [...]
Monday, February 22, 2010
The theological justification for al Qaeda’s wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Al Qaeda, Apostates, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Dr Fadl, Ends Justify The Means, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Jose Padilla, Justifications, Murder, Office of Legal Counsel, Osama bin Laden, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, Takfir, Takfiri, Takfirism, Theology, Torture
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Monday, February 15, 2010
There are times when governments fight to keep documents secret to protect sensitive intelligence or other vital national security interests. And there are times when they are just trying to cover up incompetence, misbehavior or lawbreaking.
Last week, when a British court released secret intelligence material relating to the torture allegations of a former Guantánamo prisoner, [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Binyam Mohamed, CIA, Courts, Crime, Detainees, Dick Cheney, Guantanamo, Hillary Clinton, Intelligence, Law, MI5, Rendition, Torture, War Crimes
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Sunday, February 14, 2010
You can have any opinion you want about waterboarding, but it is a fact that it is defined as “torture” under the relevant international treaties and federal law. That is a fact. In short, it is not “torture” to critics, it is “torture” under the law. And there is no dispute that the Bush Administration [...]
Friday, February 12, 2010
The NYT story also buried the significance of the timeline in the torture case. As both blogger-investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler and blogger-psychologist-activist Stephen Soldz have pointed out in articles Wednesday, the use of CIA-style “enhanced interrogation” torture was directly “conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed [...]
Is there any hope at all that the larger players in the Bush-era criminal activities – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz most prominently – will be brought to justice when those two lesser lights (Yoo and Bybee) are allowed to return to a law school classroom and a seat on the federal [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Accountability, Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Corporatism, Corruption, Crime, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Karl Rove, Law, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Rule of Law, War Crimes, William Rivers Pitt
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Millions of voters believe the GOP line about Obama’s runaway spending. It’s up to him to set the record straight…
So anyway, up jumps freshman Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas.
“You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us [...]
In sum, there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately: ongoing preservation) of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism: that because we’re “at war” with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated. To relieve ourselves of guilt and of the bad [...]
The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast [...]
Filed in Film, Notable
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Also tagged Adam Curtis, Afghanistan War, Al Qaeda, Anwar Al Sadat, Ayman al-Zawahiri, BBC, Bill Clinton, CIA, Dick Cheney, Documentary, Donald Rumsfeld, Egypt, Extremists, Fear, Gamal Abdel Nasser, George HW Bush, Guantanamo, Iraq War, Irving Kristol, Islam, Leo Strauss, Muslim Brotherhood, Muslims, Neo-Conservatives, Osama bin Laden, Paul Wolfowitz, Power of Nightmares, Rendition, Ronald Reagan, Saudi Arabia, Sayyid Qutb, Taliban, Terrorism, Tony Blair, Torture
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Shortly after Haiti was hit by a 6.1 aftershock on January 20, 2010, Amy Goodman and Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté report from the Port-au-Prince airport. Amy and Kim discuss how centuries of Western domination of Haiti has worsened the impact of the devastating earthquake, from the harsh reaction to Haiti’s independence as a republic [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Amy Goodman, Bill Clinton, Capitalism, Corporatism, Coup, Disaster Capitalism, Earthquake, Free Market, George HW Bush, Haiti, Hillary Clinton, IMF, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Kim Ives, Privatization, Washington Consensus, World Bank
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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Obama’s political problems stem from a broader Democratic inability to counter the infernal GOP noise machine — a failure now two decades old. Republican rejectionism ought to have been clear to the White House from the moment they voted unanimously against the economic stimulus — cynically betting that recovery would come too late for the [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Budget, David Axelrod, Debt, Deficit, Democrats, Economy, Karl Rove, Medicare, Recovery, Republicans
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Less than a year after No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada’s new superstore and towards the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world [...]
For the first time since the Great Depression, the United States experienced zero job growth in a decade. Zero. And zero is actually worse than it sounds since none of the preceding six decades registered job growth of less than 20 percent.
By comparison, the 1970s, which are often bemoaned as a time of economic stagflation [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Bill Clinton, Corporatism, Deregulation, Economy, Free Trade, George HW Bush, NAFTA, Poverty, Reagonomics, Ronald Reagan, Taxes, Unemployment
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Meanwhile, the IMF has typical neo-liberal conditions attached to its $100 million dollar loan, and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now! that Bush himself was responsible for “destroying Haitian democracy” when he backed the violent coup to overthrow President Aristide in 2004.
via Bush warns: Watch out for ’shysters’ | Raw Story.
Shysters, inDEED.
We speak with TransAfrica founder [...]
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