Hold the Torturers Accountable

Hold the Torturers Accountable

Video in which Cheney admits to criminal activity:


Here's another version of the video, direct from FNS:

Obama Not Keen to Investigate Bush

It is critical to the future security and well-being of the USA to recognize the importance of holding public officials accountable for suspected violations of the law. If there is reasonable suspicion that crimes have taken place, then it is imperative to investigate and prosecute if warranted. Anything less would betray the justice system, and betray the laws which President-Elect Obama has sworn to protect.

How can we move safely and securely forward into the future if with a precedent to let suspected criminals just get away without even the slightest gesture of appointing a special investigator? Really, the investigation phase could probably be avoided, the intolerable abuses of members of the Bush Administration are so obvious and flagrant. If they tried to hide them they would be more likely to be called to account than if they, however audaciously, practice their heinous acts in broad daylight. Openness gives the appearance of prudence. But even a cursory analysis reveals many actions of the Bush Administration to be improper.

Bush and Cheney et al. must be held accountable. Our future well-being and security depend on it!

It's Not Too Late to Impeach! Please Call your Congressional Representative

I sent the following note out to some of my contacts today:

I just called the office of my Congressman, Brian Baird, to advocate impeachment. His Washington D.C. office telephone number is (202) 225-3536.

What did I say in specific? Well first I sincerely told the staffer who answered the phone: "good afternoon." Then I asked to speak directly with Congressman Baird: "Is Congressman Baird available?" To which the staffer replied quite rudely: he asked what I was calling about before informing me that Mr. Baird was busy "in a meeting."

I told him that I was calling with a message about impeaching President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.

When he said that Baird was busy, I left the staffer a more detailed message. It went something like this:

I urge Congressman Baird to support holding President Bush and the Office of the Executive, including Vice-President Cheney, accountable for various alleged criminal actions, malfeasances, and improprieties relating to the function of their official duties. We need to hold them accountable if we are truly a nation of laws and ideals, and not a nation dictated by the will of men.

I believe that impeachment will benefit all Americans. I urge the Congressman to sign on as a supporter of Congressman Kucinich's 35 articles of impeachment. Impeachment will be possible with enough support from Congressional Representatives, like Congressman Baird.

Then I said thank you to the staffer for making sure to deliver the message to the Congressman.

Please try it for yourself, call your Representative, Baird or whoever yours is. Finding the telephone number is as easy as looking it up on the Internet. Please do this today or tomorrow. Make sure to speak with a live person - don't leave a voice mail. Remember to first ask to speak directly with your representative. And be friendly. It helps the staffer to listen to your message.

Finally, please talk to your friends about impeachment, and consider sending a message to people in your network asking them to call Congress on behalf of the cause of impeachment.

Sincerely,

RFWW

It's not too late to impeach! Please call your Congressperson! It will only take a few minutes.

Bush Administration Prewar Deception

Here are some excerpts from recent articles that support the claim that members of the Bush Administration knowingly and intentionally misled the people of the USA in regard to the threat posed by Iraq.

NYT:

WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.
...

Washington Post:

As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan wrote in his recently released book, "What Happened," the Iraq Group "had been set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the war to the public."

"The script had been finalized with great care over the summer," McClellan wrote, for a "campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary."
...

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (Promotional Video with author Vincent Bugliosi): Vincent Bugliosi lays out the case for prosecuting President Bush for murder, based on evidence that the President knowingly distorted the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify the invasion. Thousands of dead US military personnel and Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis later, the case for holding the President accountable for this grievous foreign policy disaster is very strong. No Blood for Oil!

It IS about Oil

www.truthout.org/article/it-was-oil-all-along

Also see the Bill Moyers Journal excerpt: www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06272008/watch3.html

Abusing Our Troops (Trading Blood for Oil)

President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. "Dick" Cheney are abusing the troops.


Photo by Laura Killian

Well, further, and according to Vincent Bugliosi, sending the troops into harm's way without national security imperative, prerogative, or necessity makes those culpable decision makers complicit in the murder of U.S. Soldiers. There was not national security justification for the invasion of Iraq. The justification for invasions/occupation is the policy of global dominance. Access to, and control of, the vast Middle East petroleum resources is a necessary ingredient in the maintenance of global dominance.

So, the essential truth is that the U.S. launched a military invasion - an act of aggression - designed to conquer, extract and exploit the mineral resources of a foreign nation. That is not okay with me. How's it by you?

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Thou Shalt Not Kill: so whatever happened to that?

"The number one book
George Bush
& Dick Cheney
DO NOT WANT
YOU TO READ:

Dear Violet
letter from a desert grave
by N. Sigafoos

"Question for George W. Bush:
If you're such a devout Christian, what happened to Thou Shalt Not Kill ?
Is it okay if you just order other people to kill for you ?"

"To Whom It May Concern:

"I'm dead. 26 years old and deader than dead. My last memory being a face full of sand as the truck rolled over and threw me alongside the road. The last thing I heard was the snap of my neck, and that was it for me. New flash: there is no 'heaven, There is no hell. There's simply another layer where your energy goes without your body. My name is Charlie Day. The late Charlie Day, which is ironic, since during my life, I could never be anywhere on time."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwhitlock/2330100803

Missing Emails

Why isn't Congress pressing Dick Cheney or the White House about this obvious and egregious breach of the public trust? Is our whole system of governance in the USA corrupted? What will it take to right the course of American Politics?

The Emails that Dick Cheney Deleted
No Comment
by Scott Horton
January 22, 2008

Late last week, right after official White House spokesmen made a series of either evasive or completely false statements about the mysterious case of the vanishing, then reappearing, then perhaps no really vanished White House emails, Henry Waxman and his Oversight Committee announced some of the conclusions they had reached. Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson published an account of it on Friday in the Washington Post:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat. The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is “no evidence” that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto’s assertion “seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us,” Waxman said. The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush Administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records — including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions — for history and in case of any future legal demands.

Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has now posted a series of studies to help us zero in on just what’s missing. It will come as no surprise to most that the big offender is the man at the center of the most virulent scandals, and the missing email traffic relates just to those dates in which a federal prosecutor would have the most interest. Vice President Dick Cheney’s office destroyed its emails, in violation of the requirements of the federal records act and potentially criminal law, for the following days:

September 12, 2003: The day on which the headlines in the New York Times read “federal appeals court in Washington yesterday rejected the Bush Administration’s effort to avoid releasing documents about Vice President Cheney Energy Task Force.”
...

read the rest: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002219

Checking the Executive

According to the authors of this article, we the people ultimately have the responsibility to hold our government, and elected officials, accountable. Rule by fear, or Rule by Law?:

by Lewis Seiler, Dan Hamburg
Monday, February 4, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943

Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."

Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.

According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists." [emphasis mine]
...
...According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.

What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?

The Constitution does not allow the executive to have unchecked power under any circumstances. The people must not allow the president to use the war on terrorism to rule by fear instead of by law.
[go to original]

Another World is Possible

I met my friend, Elisa Davinca, on Flickr, the Yahoo! photo sharing site. She is an awesome advocate for another world - a peaceful world. link to her flickr photos

I want to share a couple of videos that she shared with me:

Naomi Wolf Spoke about her new book, The End of America, at the University of Washington. It is a plea to a young patriot... The time for resistance is now!


CBS Frontline program, "Cheney's Law." torture, David Addington and the Department of Justice as they relate to the Bush Administration and Vice President Cheney

Washington State Impeachment Hearing SJM 8016 2007 - 2008

[for more information about impeachment in WA State, please see Washington for Impeachment]

Senator Eric Oemig has introduced a memorial bill that calls on the US Congress to initiate investigation into alleged impeachable offenses committed by President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Tomorrow there will be a hearing on the Memorial in the Washington State Senate Committee on Government Operations & Elections. This is from the Washington State Legislature:

go to original [link to official information about SJM 8016]
Requesting an impeachment investigation into actions by President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Here's video of Rep. Wexler discussing impeachment on the floor of the House:


Tomorrow's (Thursday, January 17th, 2008) hearing will be in the Cherberg Building (Capitol Campus, Olympia, Washington) at 3:30 PM.

Bush Style Destruction

I want to point out an interesting article by a self described Reagan Conservative - and an economist - who happens to also be anti-war and decidedly anti-Bush Administration:

go to original
"How Bush Changed My Life"
by David R. Henderson
...
Until 9/11. Like almost everyone else in America and, indeed, most people in the world, I was outraged by the 19 criminals who murdered 3,000 innocent victims. But when George Bush said, on that very same day, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward … and freedom will be defended," I smelled a rat. In saying that freedom was attacked, Bush was saying something about the motives of the attackers, even though he couldn't have known that soon what their motives were. So it seemed to me that Bush was trying to set the groundwork for a war rather than trying to go after the higher-ups behind the perpetrators. I turned out to be right. In response to 9/11, George Bush made war on Afghanistan and, depending on which audience he and Dick Cheney were speaking to, a response to 9/11 was part of their motive in attacking Iraq.
...

Holding the Executive Accountable

This is from yesterday's Washington Post:

...
The corollary to Cheney's zealous embrace of secrecy is his near total aversion to the notion of accountability. I've never seen a former member of the House of Representatives demonstrate such contempt for Congress - even when it was controlled by his own party. His insistence on invoking executive privilege to block virtually every congressional request for information has been stupefying - it's almost as if he denies the legitimacy of an equal branch of government. Nor does he exhibit much respect for public opinion, which amounts to indifference toward being held accountable by the people who elected him.
...

It's an excerpt from a column by the former Vice President Walter F. Mondale. Here's a link to the original: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The Lies that Led to War

Great film from the CBC's Fifth Estate about the misleadership and deception that precipitated the invasion of Iraq.

This and That

A little bit of this:

go to original
Harper's Weekly
...
For its temporary embassy in Washington, D.C., the Iraqi government purchased a $5.8-million Tudor-style mansion across the street from the home of Dick Cheney on Massachusetts Avenue. The mansion features a built-in espresso machine, heated floors, soft pistachio carpeting, and a Jacuzzi...

And a little bit of that:

go to original
NYT

BAGHDAD, Feb. 26 — The Iraqi cabinet approved a draft of a law today that would set guidelines for countrywide distribution of oil revenues and foreign investment in the immense oil industry.

The endorsement marked a major agreement among the country’s ethnic and sectarian political blocs on one of Iraq’s most divisive issues.

The draft law approved by the cabinet allows the central government to distribute oil revenues to the provinces or regions by population, which could lessen the economic concerns of the rebellious Sunni Arabs, who fear being cut out of Iraq’s vast potential oil wealth by the dominant Shiites and Kurds.

The law also grants regional oil companies the power to sign contracts with foreign companies for exploration and development of fields, opening the door for investment by foreign oil companies in a country whose oil reserves rank among the world’s top three in size...

Impeachment in Washington State

The impeachment ball is rolling in Washington State.

Senate Joint Memorial (SJM) 8016 requests an investigation into actions by the President and Vice President. It is scheduled for a public hearing beginning at 3:30pm on March 1st. Prior to the hearing there will be a rally on the Capitol Steps at 1:00pm.

I hope to see you there!

Constitution in Crisis: The Case for Impeachment

Last night I attended the town hall meeting Constitution in Crisis: The Case for Impeachment.

It was a great event, inspiring and very compelling. I am encouraged to step up the pressure on congress to move forward with investigations into impeachable offenses committed by the Bush Administration.

Here are some pictures:







(pictures are linked to larger versions.)

The meeting was very well attended, the Washington Center for the Performing Arts was packed. I don't know how many it holds, but I would estimate that there might have been as many as 3,000 people there. [edit: although it was packed, I don't think that it holds 3,000. There was close to 1,000 though. I just checked the seating capacity.]

The panelists made a very persuasive argument that to hold impeachment hearings, based even on only the evidence currently available to the public, is a necessity.

Here's the video:

Dick Cheney Resorts to Obscenity

go to original

Cheney Dismisses Critic With Obscenity
Clash With Leahy About Halliburton
By Helen Dewar and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 25, 2004; Page A04


A brief argument between Vice President Cheney and a senior Democratic senator led Cheney to utter a big-time obscenity on the Senate floor this week.

On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

Leahy's spokesman, David Carle, yesterday confirmed the brief but fierce exchange. "The vice president seemed to be taking personally the criticism that Senator Leahy and others have leveled against Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq," Carle said.

As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the "Defense of Decency Act" by 99 to 1.
...
This was not the first foray into French by Cheney and his boss. During the 2000 campaign, Bush pointed out a New York Times reporter to Cheney and said, without knowing the microphone was picking it up, "major-league [expletive]." Cheney's response -- "Big Time" -- has become his official presidential nickname.
...

Is this the kind of behavior that we expect or require from the holders of the highest elected offices? I think that we are delinquent as a nation, for allowing these men to remain in office far past their date of expiry.

A Candle to the Wind?

Amy Goodman recently wrote of how The USA could have benefitted from an eventual conviction of Richard Nixon. Unfortunately, view points like hers are being stifled more and more in the nation's mainstream media. Here are some excerpts and a link to her article, published at the Seattle PI:

Impeaching, prosecuting Nixon could have elevated the nation

AMY GOODMAN
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

One of the high points of the U.S. media was the investigation into the Watergate scandal. Now, 30 years later, with President Ford's death, the media are contributing to the cover-up they once exposed.
...
Let's review the history: Nixon was running for re-election in 1972 against anti-war Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota. Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP -- their acronym, not mine) had been conducting a campaign of dirty tricks against potential Democratic presidential candidates. In May and June 1972, Nixon operatives, called "The Plumbers" (so-called as they both plugged up and generated information leaks), broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, based at The Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The burglars, including an ex-CIA man and several Cuban American veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, were planting bugs and photographing documents. An address book on one of the burglars linked them to the White House.
...
John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, became the star witness of the Senate investigation. He linked Nixon not only to the cover-up, but also to the criminal break-in of the psychiatrist's office of Pentagon whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg. In an exclusive "Democracy Now!" broadcast with Ellsberg and Dean, the two former antagonists spoke together on national television for the first time. They described other dirty schemes planned but not acted on, such as "incapacitating" Ellsberg, and firebombing The Brookings Institution.
...
For Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon's resignation was an opportunity: Ford made Rumsfeld his chief of staff, with Cheney as his assistant. When Rumsfeld moved over to secretary of defense, Cheney became chief of staff. George H.W. Bush was named director of Central Intelligence. Journalist Robert Parry describes the Ford administration as the "incubator" of the current Bush administration.

If those emerging power brokers had witnessed a vigorous prosecution of Nixon and his co-conspirators, it could have elevated the country ... and changed history. Perhaps a decade later, the Reagan-Bush administration would have thought twice about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which an unaccountable administration would defy Congress and illegally support the Contras in Nicaragua, who killed thousands of civilians. Perhaps the current Bush administration would not have dared to manipulate intelligence to invade Iraq, leading to the deaths of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

As the nation buries President Ford, let's not let the U.S. media bury the story.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/298235_amy04.html