Bush & Rumsfeld Out of Control
Find a Conversation
| Tue, 06-08-2004 - 5:48am |
The team of Bush & Rumsfeld have reduced the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />United States government to the level of the Spanish inquisition. They’re ruined my wonderful country so that now, instead of the light of the world, we are an evil power. Torturing POWs is abhorrent to all civilized people that’s why nations agreed to accept the first Geneva Convention in 1864, right up to the fourth in 1949 . The United States signed all the additional protocols added up to 1977, but congress didn’t ratify the 1977 addition concerning the treatment of guerilla fighters. Bush is using this to claim that he had the right to order torture. He has even flaunted our own country’s law against torture. The man is an out of control menace to civilization. He has not learned from history, perhaps because he read any.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
http://hnn.us/articles/586.html
I don’t want to hear the childish “Well, Saddam tortured them worse†line of reasoning. I’ve had it. Two wrongs have never made a right. These people need to be impeached.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08ABUS.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
June 8, 2004
Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 7 — A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.
The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.
One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."
Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. "It was not a legal analysis."
Mr. Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantánamo, four of which required Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval, did not constitute torture and were consistent with international treaties.
The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law.
A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.
The previously disclosed Justice Department memorandum concluded that administration officials were justified in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.
Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the administration's top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department's position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.
The March memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was prepared as part of a review of interrogation techniques by a working group appointed by the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes. The group itself was led by the Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker, and included military and civilian lawyers from all branches of the armed services.
The review stemmed from concerns raised by Pentagon lawyers and interrogators at Guantánamo after Mr. Rumsfeld approved a set of harsher interrogation techniques in December 2002 to use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot.
Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair, on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group's review. Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military's Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, told reporters last Friday that the working group "wanted to do what is humane and what is legal and consistent not only with" the Geneva Conventions, but also "what is right for our soldiers."
Mr. Di Rita said that the Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel's office.
The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.
The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith," the report said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."
The adjective "severe," the report said, "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be `severe.' " The report also advised that if an interrogator "has a good faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture."
The report also said that interrogators could justify breaching laws or treaties by invoking the doctrine of necessity. An interrogator using techniques that cause harm might be immune from liability if he "believed at the moment that his act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm."
Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration's confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.
Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch, said Monday, "We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the criminal consequences of doing so."
The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.
Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article

Elaine
Pages
Bush 271
Gore 266
Nader 0
Bush did "win".
On what basis do you make such a claim? You are aware that the vast majority of our democratically elected representatives in Congress authorized and supported the action in Iraq, are you not? You do realize that the Patriot Act was passed by those same representatives, not ordered by George Bush, do you not? I realize that now that times are tough in Iraq, a lot of folks would like to disassociate themselves from it, but none of this was the action of a single man proclaiming himself King.
They won't be spying on my telephone conversations, becasue I am not in this country illegally. They won't be torturing me in any prison (or interrogating me lawfully for that matter) because I won't be shooting at any of our troops. And they may be coming to arrest you for no reason in your little fantasyland, but the fact is no one in this country is arrested for no reason. We have warrants, we have probable cause, all of the people detained have at the very least immigration violations. People who obey our laws have nothing to fear from our government.
According to our election system as it has been in place for decades, he did win. We have an electoral college for a reason-so that states like New York and California do not get to decide the outcome of the presidential race without any other states' voice being heard. It's called a republic.
Think again.
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4656.shtml
Capitol Hill Blue
Jun 8th, 2004
What Price Freedom?
How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing
Information About You
By TERESA HAMPTON & DOUG THOMPSON
You're on your way to work in the morning and place a call on your
wireless phone. As your call is relayed by the wireless tower, it is
also relayed by another series of towers to a microwave antenna on top
of Mount Weather between Leesburg and Winchester, Virginia and then
beamed to another antenna on top of an office building in Arlington
where it is recorded on a computer hard drive.
The computer also records you phone digital serial number, which is
used to identify you through your wireless company phone bill that the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has on record as
part of your permanent file.
A series of sophisticated computer programs listens to your phone
conversation and looks for "keywords" that suggest suspicious
activity. If it picks up those words, an investigative file is opened
and sent to the Department of Homeland Security.
Congratulations. Big Brother has just identified you as a potential
threat to the security of the United States because you might have
used words like "take out" (as in taking someone out when you were in
fact talking about ordering takeout for lunch) or "D-Day" (as in
deadline for some nefarious activity when you were talking about going
to the new World War II Memorial to recognize the 60th anniversary of
D-Day).
If you are lucky, an investigator at DHS will look at the entire
conversation in context and delete the file. Or he or she may keep the
file open even if they realize the use of words was innocent. Or they
may decide you are, indeed, a threat and set up more investigation,
including a wiretap on your home and office phones, around-the-clock
surveillance and much closer looks at your life.
Welcome to America, 2004, where the actions of more than 150 million
citizens are monitored 24/7 by the TIA, the Terrorist Information
Awareness (originally called Total Information Awareness) program of
DARPA, DHS and the Department of Justice.
Although Congress cut off funding for TIA last year, the Bush
Administration ordered the program moved into the Pentagon's "black
bag" budget, which is neither authorized nor reviewed by the Hill.
DARPA also increased the use of private contractors to get around
privacy laws that would restrict activities by federal employees.
Six months of interviews with security consultants, former DARPA
employees, privacy experts and contractors who worked on the TIA
facility at 3701 Fairfax Drive in Arlington reveal a massive snooping
operation that is capable of gathering -- in real time -- vast amounts
of information on the day to day activities of ordinary Americans.
Going on a trip? TIA knows where you are going because your train,
plane or hotel reservations are forwarded automatically to the DARPA
computers. Driving? Every time you use a credit card to purchase gas,
a record of that transaction is sent to TIA which can track your
movements across town or across the country.
Use a computerized transmitter to pay tolls? TIA is notified every
time that transmitter passes through a toll booth. Likewise, that
lunch you paid for with your VISA becomes part of your permanent file,
along with your credit report, medical records, driving record and
even your TV viewing habits.
Subscribers to the DirecTV satellite TV service should know -- but
probably don't -- that every pay-per-view movie they order is reported
to TIA as is any program they record using a TIVO recording system. If
they order an adult film from any of DirecTV's three SpiceTV channels,
that information goes to TIA and is, as a matter of policy, forwarded
to the Department of Justice's special task force on pornography.
"We have a police state far beyond anything George Orwell imagined in
his book 1984," says privacy expert Susan Morrissey. "The everyday
lives of virtually every American are under scrutiny 24-hours-a-day by
the government."
Paul Hawken, owner of the data information mining company Groxis,
agrees, saying the government is spending more time watching ordinary
Americans than chasing terrorists and the bad news is that they aren't
very good at it.
"It's the Three Stooges go to data mining school," says Hawken. "Even
worse, DARPA is depending on second-rate companies to provide them
with the technology, which only increases the chances for errors."
One such company is Torch Concepts. DARPA provided the company with
flight information on five million passengers who flew Jet Blue
Airlines in 2002 and 2003. Torch then matched that information with
social security numbers, credit and other personal information in the
TIA databases to build a prototype passenger profiling system.
Jet Blue executives were livid when they learned how their passenger
information, which they must provide the government under the USA
Patriot Act, was used and when it was presented at a technology
conference with the title: Homeland Security -- Airline Passenger Risk
Assessment.
Privacy Expert Bill Scannell didn't buy Jet Blue's anger.
"JetBlue has assaulted the privacy of 5 million of its customers,"
said Scannell. "Anyone who flew should be aware and very scared that
there is a dossier on them."
But information from TIA will be used the DHS as a major part of the
proposed CAPSII airline passenger monitoring system. That system, when
fully in place, will determine whether or not any American is allowed
to get on an airplane for a flight.
JetBlue requested the report be destroyed and the passenger data be
purged from the TIA computers but TIA refuses to disclose the status
of either the report or the data.
Although exact statistics are classified, security experts say the
U.S. Government has paid out millions of dollars in out-of-court
settlements to Americans who have been wrongly accused, illegally
detained or harassed because of mistakes made by TIA. Those who accept
settlements also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and won't
discuss their cases.
Hawken refused to do business with DARPA, saying TIA was both
unethical and illegal.
"We got a lot of e-mails from companies -- even conservative ones --
saying, 'Thank you. Finally someone won't do something for money,'" he
adds.
Those who refuse to work with TIA include specialists from the
super-secret National Security Agency in Fort Meade, MD. TIA uses
NSA's technology to listen in on wireless phone calls as well as the
agency's list of key words and phrases to identify potential terrorist
activity.
"I know NSA employees who have quit rather than cooperate with DARPA,"
Hawken says. "NSA's mandate is to track the activities of foreign
enemies of this nation, not Americans
1. They've lied shamelessly to The People of this country.
2. They've lied to the world, destroying our reputation. Invasion. Occupation. Indefinate and unjustified imprisonment. Torture. Is this the United States of America in action? Is this the country I was raised in? We used to fight the invaders.
3. Almost 1,000 American lives lost. We're destroying our most precious resource: each other.
4. Almost 40,000 lives lost among the Iraqis. Were most of these combattants. Nope. Quite a few were women, children, old men. You know, the collateral damage.
5. 87 Billion. To begin with. More request to follow. And yet we can't possibly work out a system that would give every American healthcare. We can't fully fund public schools which work. The government can't fund it's own inane mandates. We want highly qualified teachers, but do it out of love for the children. They don't get the highly qualified salary, unless they're lucky enough to work in one of the few districts where outrageously high property taxes are tolerated for the sake of the schools. And if you're one of the children of those districts, great. If not, you're just screwed. Americorp: barely enough to rent a room and feed yourself and some forgiveness of student loans, in exchange for years out of your life. Help to rebuild America, and fill in the gaps where government fails. Apparently this isn't as worthy as rebuilding Iraq. Eighty Seven Billion Dollars. Every dollar spent on this travesty endangers our future.
6. The Draft. Sure, no one will have the balls to say the word while an election looms, but consider that the Armed Forces are desperate for warm bodies to the point where the people who have already fufilled their voluntary commitments are being forced to extend their tours.
7. Tangential to the draft issue...how many of these young men and women went into the forces not because it was what they wanted, but out of sheer economic necessity? For someone with more aspirations than resources, the deal seems perfect. Until you're dying at 19 for reasons no one is necessarily certain of.
8. Saddam didn't have a damned thing to do with the 9-11 tragedy. But we have him. And not Bin Laden. Was it easier to pick the fight with Saddam since we knew where he was, at least generally speaking? Wouldn't some of what we're spending on Iraq be better put towards finding the people who are engineering attacks on Americans daily?
9. Just say no to constitutionalized discrimination. We can't amend the Constitution to state that women are just as equal as men? But we can amend the Constitution to institutionalize discrimination based on religious doctrine? Sure! You can persue happiness, as long as we approve of it! Is it tradition? Owning other people used to be tradition. Segregation enforced by guns, laws, lynchings and angry dogs was tradition. Beating your wife used to be traditional. Burning crosses is still traditional in some corners of the country. Can we -not- argue from tradition?
10. Let's get our own house in order before we start fixing up other people's. And why are some people more worthy of intervention than others? What happened to the Kurds was bad. So is what happened in Rwanda. And what's presently happening in the Sudan. People are being driven from their homes, on forced marches through inhospitable terrain, burying the dead as they go, and seeking refuge anywhere they can. Sound familiar? (Besides what happened to Native Americans). Never again? Apparently not unless there's something to be gained from intervention.
C
When did Saddam attack the US? Fortunately, not all countries feel this way. Following your reasoning Iran, Syria and North Korea have a right to attack the US because they believe we are targeting them.
Upon what bases? What had Saddam done to the US.
Pages