“He’s winning the Democratic process, but that is virtually irrelevant to the general election.” – Harold Ickes, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, speaking about Barack Obama’s success in the democratic party primary season.
Is this the kind of democratic nominee that the nation deserves? To obtain the nomination in contravention of “the Democratic process”! Sounds a bit like the current administration doesn’t it?
Thank about that for awhile.
http://www.connpost.com/localnews/ci_8265434
Lieberman says some waterboarding OK
By PETER URBAN
Article Last Updated: 02/15/2008 01:39:42 AM EST
WASHINGTON — Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman reluctantly acknowledged Thursday that he does not believe waterboarding is torture, but believes the interrogation technique should be available only under the most extreme circumstances. Lieberman was one of 45 senators who voted Wednesday in opposition to a bill that would limit the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method where detainees typically are strapped to a bench and have water poured into their mouth and nose making them feel as if they will drown.
The Senate passed the measure.
“We are at war,” Lieberman said. “I know enough from public statements made by Osama bin Laden and others as well as classified information I see to know the terrorists are actively planning, plotting to attack us again. I want our government to be able to gather information again within both the law and Geneva Convention.”
In the worst case scenario — when there is an imminent threat of a nuclear attack on American soil — Lieberman said that the president should be able to certify the use of waterboarding on a detainee suspected of knowing vital details of the plot.
“You want to be able to use emergency tech to try to get the information out of that person,” Lieberman said. Of course, Lieberman believes such authority has limits. He does not believe the president could authorize having hot coals pressed on someone’s flesh to obtain that information.
The difference, he said, is that waterboarding is mostly psychological and there is no permanent physical damage. “It is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological,” Lieberman said. Lieberman said that his position on waterboarding differs from that of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who he has endorsed as a presidential candidate. As a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, McCain was tortured. McCain, he said, believes waterboarding is torture.
Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who voted for the ban, also introduced legislation Wednesday to reform the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to restore habeus corpus rights for detainees and ban torture. This month, Dodd bluntly described waterboarding as torture. “Let me be clear: there is no such thing as simulated drowning. When a person is strapped to a board and water is poured into their mouth and nose with no way to get air, that is drowning; that is torture,” he said.
CIA Director Michael Hayden recently acknowledged that the CIA has used waterboarding against three prisoners. He prohibited its use in CIA interrogations in 2006; it has not been used since 2003, he said.
On Thursday, Steven G. Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told the House subcommittee on the Constitution that laws and other limits enacted since three terrorism suspects were waterboarded have eliminated the technique from what is now legally allowed.
Vice President Dick Cheney defended the use of tougher interrogation methods last week during a speech before the Conservative Political Action Convention and the Pennsylvania State Victory Committee. “It’s a tougher program for a very few tougher customers,” Cheney said. “The program is run by highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law. And the program has uncovered a wealth of information that has foiled attacks against the United States.”
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who supported the waterboarding prohibition, said Wednesday that the nightmare scenario threat was a specious argument because the Constitution grants the president the right to act when the country is in immediate peril.
“If he so chooses, as commander in chief, to authorize activities other than what the Army Field Manual allows, then the president would be accountable directly to the American people under the circumstances with which he invoked that article II authority,” Nelson said.
Emphasis added.
For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means 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.
Emphasis added.
In other news, MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann declaims president Bush a fascist guilty of terrorism.
Amy,
Why are you so vindictive? Can you not enjoy the least bit of success without inciting drama?
I’m ashamed to say that it was only about a week ago that thoughts started cropping up in my head prompting me to consider one last attempt at finding a redeemable personality underneath your shell. And then you go and write this.
It’s pathological how you handle those in your life that exhibit any sense of drive or success. I know you don’t see it that way right now, and may never see it, but one thing I do have faith in. I have faith in the wheel of karma. It’s still spinning. It is unavoidable.
You have disappointed me for the last time. I no longer harbor hope or expectation for anything honorable from you. Be well.
The well has been poisoned for awhile. Must have been all the monkeys flinging poo down the hole. The pestilence can no longer be looked over or avoided. So the only thing that can be done will be done.
If I were smarter or more resourceful, I could write a book about social dynamics on the internet. On second thought, there’s nothing new under the sun, so I’ll just amble on by.
Fuck you. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on (because you sure as shit didn’t fly in). Fuck you very much.
What follows is the full text of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment: President of Hypocrisy that aired on September 20, 2007.
So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we’d all interrupted him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the substantive issues like the Israeli raid on Syria in condescending and infuriating fashion, produced a big-wow political finish that indicates, certainly, that if it wasn’t already — the annual Republican witch-hunting season is underway.
“I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military.
“And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad.
“And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Move-On-Dot-Org — or **more** afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States military.”
“That was a sorry deal.”
First off, it’s “Democrat-ic” party, Sir.
You keep pretending you’re not a politician, so stop using words your party made up. Show a little respect.
Secondly, you could say this seriously after the advertising/mugging of Senator Max Cleeland? After the swift-boating of John Kerry?
But most importantly… making that the last question?
So that there was no chance at a follow-up?
So nobody could point out — as Chris Matthews so incisively did, a week ago tonight — that you were the one who inappropriately interjected General Petraeus into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!
Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, **you** shanghaied a military man as your personal spokesman — and now you’re complaining about the outcome, and then running away from the microphone?
Eleven months ago the President’s own party — the Republican National Committee — introduced this very different kind of advertisement, just nineteen days before the mid-term elections.
Bin Laden.
And Zawahiri’s rumored quote of six years ago about having bought “suitcase bombs.”
All set against a ticking clock, and finally a blinding explosion… and the dire announcement:
“These are the stakes – vote, November 7th.”
That one was ok, Mr. Bush?
Terrorizing your own people in hopes of getting them to vote for your own party has never brought as much as a public comment from you?
The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleeland and lying about Lieutenant John Kerry met with your approval?
But a shot at General Petraeus — about whom you conveniently ignore it is you who reduced him from four-star hero to a political hack — that merits this pissy juvenile blast at the Democrats on national television?
Your hypocrisy is so vast, Sir, that if we could somehow use it to fill the ranks in Iraq you could realize your dream — and keep us fighting there until the year 3000.
The line between the military and the civilian government is not to be crossed.
When Douglas MacArthur attempted to make policy for the United States in Korea half a century ago, President Truman moved quickly to fire him, even though Truman knew it meant his own political suicide, and the de-ification of a General who history suggests had begun to lose his mind.
When George McClellan tried to make policy for the Union in the Civil War, President Lincoln finally fired his chief General, even though he knew McClellan could galvanize political opposition – as he did… when McClellan ran as Lincoln’s presidential opponent in 1864 and nearly defeated our greatest president.
Even when the conduit flowed the other way and Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to smear the Army because it wouldn’t defer the service of one of McCarthy’s staff aides, the entire civilian and Defense Department structures — after four years of fearful servitude — rose up against McCarthy and said “enough” and buried him.
The list is not endless — but it is instructive.
Air Force General LeMay — who broke with Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis — and was retired.
Army General Edwin Anderson Walker — who started passing out John Birch Society leaflets to his soldiers.
Marine General Smedley Butler — who revealed to Congress the makings of a plot to remove F-D-R as President — and for merely being approached by the plotters, was phased out of the military hierarchy.
These careers were ended because the line between the military and the civilian is… not… to… be… crossed!
Mr. Bush, you had no right to order General Petraeus to become your front man.
And he obviously should have refused that order and resigned rather than ruin his military career.
The upshot is — and contrary it is, to the Move-On advertisement — he betrayed himself more than he did us.
But there has been in his actions a sort of reflexive courage, some twisted vision of duty at a time of crisis. That the man doesn’t understand that serving officers cannot double as serving political ops, is not so much his fault as it is your good, exploitable, fortune.
But Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of ‘the planted last question‘ at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no **right** for your opponents or critics to as much as **respond**.
That, Sir, is not only un-American — it is dictatorial.
And in **pimping** General David Petraeus, Sir, in violation of everything this country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the gleaming **radioactive** demarcation between the military and the political, and to portray **your** party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.
You did it again today, Sir, and you need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.
It is a line — thankfully only the first of a **series** — that makes the military political, and the political, military.
It is a line which history shows is always the **first** one crossed when a democratic government in some other country has started down the long, slippery, suicidal slope towards a Military Junta.
Get back behind that line, Mr. Bush, before some of your supporters mistake your dangerous transgression, for a call to further politicize **our** military.
—
Good night, and good luck.
There is a sorry deal here, but it’s not the MoveOn.org advertisement or the way that non-republicans have responded (or not responded) to it. I’m sure you can figure it out.
Fox censors Sally Field in US telecast of Emmys
RAW STORY Published: Monday September 17, 2007
Fox US producers of Sunday’s Emmy telecast censored best drama actress winner Sally Field Sunday evening after she veered off into a remark criticizing the US invasion of Iraq.
“If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn’t be any god -” she said when the sound went dead and the camera suddenly turned away from the stage so viewers would be distracted. Chopped off were the words “god-damned wars in the first place.” According to the LA Times, the phrase was not censored in the Canadian telecast.)
Technically, the use of “goddamn” is not profane, according to a 2003 FCC ruling regarding Bono’s use of “goddamn” at the 2003 Golden Globes.
Well they showed their true colors there didn’t they. Red, white, and blue … my ass!
On Independence Day we give thanks, we give thanks for our Founders, we give thanks for all the brave citizen-soldiers of our Continental Army who dropped pitchforks and took up muskets to fight for our freedom and liberty and independence.
You’re the successors of those brave men. Those who wear the uniform are the successors of those who dropped their pitchforks and picked up their muskets to fight for liberty. Like those early patriots, you’re fighting a new and unprecedented war — pledging your lives and honor to defend our freedom and way of life. In this war, the weapons have changed, and so have our enemies, but one thing remains the same: The men and women of the Guard stand ready to put on the uniform and fight for America.
How dare he besmirch the scared honor of those who fought more than two centuries ago for our independence by conflating the revolutionary war with his personal vendetta war action in Iraq. The establishment of democratic government in Iraq is of no ultimate consequence to me. If the territory imploded upon itself and was divided into three or more despot kingdoms I could care less. More than enough blood has been shed, Mr. President. Please remove your head from your ass and listen to your people.
11 Apr 2007 05:01:03 GMT
Source: Reuters
WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) – The White House wants to appoint a high-profile overseer to manage the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but has had trouble finding someone to take the job, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have turned down the position, the report said.
Um, excuse me. Isn’t that the President’s job? This just looks like an engineered scape goat plan, and ‘at least three retired four-star generals’ know that as well.
NSA Bill Performs a Patriot Act
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn) should be charged with treason for this.