All that tea party outrage against immigrants who might get medical care, but NO outrage about this

The teabaggers have never uttered one peep about this squandering of American tax dollars:

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

The outright theft of billions, billions more given in no-bid contracts to Halliburton and KBR, the wholesale squandering of the entire Clinton-era surplus to pay for George W. Bush's wars -- wars without end that Barack Obama feels somehow obliged to continue.

When I draw the verbal picture of billionaires pointing our attention at the poor while they're lifting the last few bucks out of our wallets while we're distracted, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

So George W. Bush has admitted that he is a war criminal.

Peter Daou:

This story should be as big as the midterms, but it won’t be. The U.S. media long ago determined that George W. Bush’s transgressions have ceased to be newsworthy. One of the reasons is that the Obama administration made the disastrous choice not to investigate Bush. That cop-out allows Bush to freely admit he approved torture:

Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture. In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

In his book, titled “Decision Points,” Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was “Damn right” and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.

Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said, “Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime. The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this admission is what is most interesting.”

M. Cherif Boussiani, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University who co-chaired the U.N. experts committee that drafted the torture convention, said that Bush’s admission could theoretically expose him to prosecution. But he also said Bush must have presumed that he would have the government’s backing in any confrontation with others’ courts.

So, President Obama...you agreed not to pursue any action against your predecessor. He's now admitted to being an international criminal, and Mitch McConnell says the only thing he wants to do over the next two years is make sure you don't get a second term.

How's that bipartisanship thing working out for ya?

NOW can we stop giving these criminals contracts?

Of all the government spending that teabaggers complain about, strangely missing is the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that goes into the coffers of Halliburton (and by extension, of Dick Cheney, who still receives about $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from his tenure there). Even when Halliburton receives industry contracts, it's because of taxpayer money squandered, as with its recently-announced contract to refurbish oil wells in Iraq for ExxonMobil-- wells that would not be available to them had George W. Bush and Dick Cneney not decided to invade Iraq. But Halliburton made plenty of money off of the BushCheney war adventure:


March 2003: Halliburton is awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires and make emergency repairs to Iraq's oil infrastructure.

May 2003: Halliburton's Iraq and Afghanistan contracts are valued at $600 million.

December 2003: An audit shows that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. government by as much as $64 million.

May 2004: Then still a subsidiary of Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root already has received $5 billion in LOGCAP (Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program) contract money. KBR has electrocuted American soldiers, given them tainted water to drink and spoiled food to eat.

February 2006: Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root is awarded a $385 million contract to build temporary immigration centers. You know, the ones that the teabaggers think Obama built to hold THEM.

June 2010: Halliburton is awarded a rebuilding contract for Haiti following the devastating earthquake. There is currently a cholera epidemic in Haiti -- six months after Halliburton's contract is awarded.

And it isn't just the U.S. government for whom Halliburton does shoddy work, for it was the company behind the cement used to attempt to seal the bottom of the Macondo Deepwater Horizon well. And the company knew damn well that the cement was unstable -- and used it anyway:

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

And we all know how THAT turned out.

This is what 4.416 American soldiers gave their lives for

I want an apology from every fucking wingnut who insisted we were not in Iraq for oil and to line Dick Cheney's pockets:

Further to our report last week Halliburton has confirmed that it has been awarded a letter of intent by Shell Iraq Petroleum Development B.V. for the development of the Majnoon field in Southern Iraq.

Dow Jones suggests the contract for the 15 wells could be worth $150m.

The giant Majnoon field is one of the world’s largest oilfields. The letter of intent provides that Halliburton will serve as project manager for the development work, in affiliation with Nabors Drilling and Iraq Drilling Company (IDC). The contract is still subject to final approval by the appropriate Iraqi authorities.

Shell is lead operator and holds a 45 percent share, partner Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas) holds 30 percent and the Iraqi state holds 25 percent of the participating interests in all licenses. Shell has announced that the consortium intends to increase production from the current ~45,000 barrels of oil per day to a targeted production plateau of 1.8 million barrels of oil per day.

“Halliburton has made a sizeable investment in Iraq and we look forward to providing services to Shell and the consortium in order to increase production at this historic oil field,” said Dave Lesar, Halliburton’s Chairman, President and CEO. “We have in place the technology, equipment and personnel to ensure that we deliver the solutions that will help our customers in this region to meet their production goals.”

Halliburton has been active in the Middle East since 1946. Currently, Halliburton has more than 4,000 employees in the Middle East, and construction on phase I of Halliburton’s 400-man base in Burjisia, Iraq is complete.

George W. Mengele

When we have evidence that George W. Bush authorized experimentation on detainees in his so-called War On Terror, is it OK to post the above headline now?

In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals’ involvement in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.

(via)

This evidence indicating apparent research and experimentation on detainees opens the door to potential additional legal liability for the CIA and Bush-era officials. There is no publicly available evidence that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel determined that the alleged experimentation and research performed on detainees was lawful, as it did with the “enhanced” techniques themselves.

“The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation,” said Frank Donaghue, PHR’s Chief Executive Officer. “Not only are these alleged acts gross violations of human rights law, they are a grave affront to America’s core values.”

[snip]

Physicians for Human Rights demands that President Obama direct the Attorney General to investigate these allegations, and if a crime is found to have been committed, prosecute those responsible. Additionally, Congress must immediately amend the War Crimes Act (WCA) to remove changes made to the WCA in 2006 by the Bush Administration that allow a more permissive definition of the crime of illegal experimentation on detainees in US custody. The more lenient 2006 language of the WCA was made retroactive to all acts committed by US personnel since 1997.

“In their attempt to justify the war crime of torture, the CIA appears to have committed another alleged war crime – illegal experimentation on prisoners,” said Nathaniel A. Raymond, Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture and lead report author. “Justice Department lawyers appear to never have assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture.”

PHR’s report, Experiments in Torture, is relevant to present-day national security interrogations, as well as Bush-era detainee treatment policies. As recently as February, 2010, President Obama’s then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, disclosed that the US had established an elite interrogation unit that will conduct “scientific research” to improve the questioning of suspected terrorists. Admiral Blair declined to provide important details about this effort.

“If health professionals participated in unethical human subject research and experimentation they should be held to account,” stated Scott A. Allen, MD, a medical advisor to Physicians for Human Rights and lead medical author of the report. “Any health professional who violates their ethical codes by employing their professional expertise to calibrate and study the infliction of harm disgraces the health profession and makes a mockery of the practice of medicine.”

Of course what else would you expect from a guy who does this:

"We were terrible to animals," recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out.

"Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them," Mr. Throckmorton said. "Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up."

Perhaps this is why the right is so bound and determined to paint Barack Obama as the antichrist. It's just projection of their worship for his predecessor -- a sociopath just like them.

Special Bonus Link: Connecting the Oil Dots.

The Obama Administration is protecting a war criminal

When the history books write about the Obama Administration, Barack Obama's biggest shortcoming won't be his coziness with Wall Street, but his refusal to see justice done to the worst war criminal in the history of the United States: Richard Bruce Cheney.

Here's how confident Cheney is that he won't be prosecuted: Not only did he advocate waterboarding a suspect who was already talking, as I noted yesterday, but he came right out and said that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding", and also came right out and said that the orders for CIA operatives to torture detainees came right from himself and his ventriloquist's dummy from Texas:

The reason I've been outspoken is because there were some things being said, especially after we left office, about prosecuting CIA personnel that had carried out our counterterrorism policy or disbarring lawyers in the Justice Department who had -- had helped us put those policies together, and I was deeply offended by that, and I thought it was important that some senior person in the administration stand up and defend those people who'd done what we asked them to do.

So now you have the most recent vice-president of the United States admitting to a war crime, and NOTHING is going to be done about it by his successor.

And THAT is going to be the biggest failing of Barack Obama.

More here, here, and here,

Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Roger Shuler, a.k.a. The Legal Schnauzer, on how Obama still doesn't fully "get it" about Republicans.

Money quote:

For roughly 30 years, since Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech about states' rights, conservative Republicans have been marked by four traits:

* A willingness to twist the truth for political gain;

* A willingness to act corruptly in order to gain and consolidate political power;

* A willingness to make expert use of the race-based fear card in order to attract middle-class white voters; and

* A tendency to govern in such an incompetent fashion that voters turn to Democrats to clean up Republican messes.

Obama clearly wants to break this dysfunctional cycle. But we fear he's going about it the wrong way.

The president tried to reason with Republicans last Friday--politely, but bluntly, calling them on their false statements. For good measure, Obama seemingly tried to shame them into realizing that they needed to work with Democrats in a bipartisan, constructive fashion.

But here, we suspect, is the ugly truth about the modern GOP: You can't reason with them, and you can't shame them into doing the right thing.

That's because the modern Republican political brand, shaped by Reagan with several dollops of Nixonian skulduggery, remains intact. It never has been discredited the way it should have been long ago.

You may not agree with the tinfoil with which he closes the post (I actually do), but it is apot on the money.

Put on your tinfoil bonnet with the blue ribbons on it...

Maybe you haven't put on your tinfoil hat in a while. Maybe it's buried deep in your closet, behind all the half-pairs of globes, the old acrylic knit mufflers with lint-pills all over them and the old holiday wreath you decided you didn't like anymore and are just waiting till it's warm enough to hold a garage sale so you can see if someone else might be willing to pay a quarter for it. But I think it's time to take it out.

Remember Dr. David Kelly? He was the U.N. weapons inspector who doubted the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and later showed up "suicided" in a park near his home. His death was, in fact, ruled a suicide, despite the fact that first responders at the scene doubted that he had taken his own life.

Larisa Alexandrovna has unearthed this little tidbit of tinfoiliana:

A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported.

And a 30-year secrecy order has been placed on written records provided to Lord Hutton's inquiry which were not produced in evidence.

The Ministry of Justice said decisions on the evidence were a matter for Lord Hutton. But Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has conducted his own investigations into Dr Kelly's death, described the order as "astonishing".

Dr Kelly's body was found in woods close to his Oxfordshire home in 2003, shortly after it was revealed that he was the source of a BBC report casting doubt on the Government's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being fired within 45 minutes.

An inquest was suspended by then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who ruled that Lord Hutton's inquiry could take its place. But in the event, the inquiry focused more on the question of how the BBC report came to be broadcast than on the medical explanation for Dr Kelly's death.

Lord Hutton's report in 2004 concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist. But the finding has been challenged by doctors who claim that the weapons inspector's stated injuries were not serious enough.

One of the doctors seeking a full inquest, former assistant coroner Michael Powers, told the Mail on Sunday he had seen a letter from the legal team of Oxfordshire County Council explaining the unusual restrictions placed by Lord Hutton on material relating to his inquiry.

The letter states: "Lord Hutton made a request for the records provided to the inquiry, not produced in evidence, to be closed for 30 years, and that medical (including post-mortem) reports and photographs be closed for 70 years."

...and asks:

If Dr. Kelly committed suicide, then his medical records should not be sealed as there is no reason to seal them. If, however, Dr. Kelly was murdered, then the sealing of the medical records only adds more weight to what most reasonable people already suspect actually happened.

Someday, long after ALL of us are dead, perhaps the truth about the extent of the Bush Administration/Tony Blair crimes to gin up a war in Iraq will be known. But between this astonishing ruling and the lack of will to hold these criminals to account, even here in the U.S., where a kid can be put away for years for smoking pot, it's clear that what Nixon said is de facto true: When the president does it, then it is not illegal.

Unless he's a Democrat, of course. Then all bets are off.

If only Barack Obama had the balls to renege on his apparent deal to not prosecute the Bush/Cheney junta

With Dick Cheney emerging from his hidey-hold to call Barack Obama a pussy and a Threat to America, it would seem to be time to declare that all previous agreements to not look backwards are off, and that it's full speed ahead on investigation of the crimes of George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney.

Especially now that it's pretty clear that the Bush Administration's torture tactics were NOT for the purpose of stopping a potential terrorist attack, but were instead used to further the aim of ginning up a phony Iraq/Al Qaeda link to justify their dick-waving war in Iraq.

As usual, only Rachel Maddow has the guts to report the truth:

I know that we have a great many problems to deal with in this country. But if you think that any of the potential Republican hopefuls for 2012 aren't looking at the Bushcheney tactics and thinking "I'd like to do that", guess again.

Of course, I'm not necessarily convinced that Barack Obama hasn't embraced them as well.

So if you want to know what makes a 23-year-old from a privileged background decide to sign up with jihadists, perhaps it's because the leaders of the country the jihadists want to attack decided it was perfectly OK to use torture to gin up a phony case for war against a country that did nothing to us.

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

God, will this overcompensating limpdick NEVER go away:

MCLEAN, Va. — On the eve of the unveiling of the nation’s new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side with the Taliban if they think the United States is heading for the exits.

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

After reading that I have to either perform a self-lobotomy with a chef's knife just to make it stop, or look at some major league cuteness.

I choose Teh Cute:

OK. I feel better now.

Will this lie told often enough become truth?

WTF?

Dana Perino says that we did not have a terrorist attack on this country during George W. Bush's term:

We already know that the Way of the Republican is to lie, lie, lie, and tell the same lie often and consistently: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. No one could have anticipated the breach of the levees. Barack Obama ordered "In God We Trust" removed from coins.

They don't even try to relate facts anymore, these Republicans, they just pull stuff out of their asses and call it truth. Fox News puts it out there and because it has "News" in its name, it has credibility. So now we're supposed to believe that the 9/11 attacks happened, when? During Bill Clinton's administration? Or are they trying to erase George W. Bush entirely and make their idiotic, unthinking, willfully ignorant minions think we went right from Clinton to Obama?

So yes, let's call the Fort Hood attacks terrorism. And then let's call the killing of Dr. George Tiller terrorism as well. But don't sit there and tell me that no terrorists attacked this country on George Bush's watch. That worthless piece of shit was on vacation when he received warning of an imminent attack, and he chose to do nothing -- or worse, let it play out as planned so he could get his war with Iraq (an idea that no longer seems unthinkable as it once did). I know that a lie told often enough becomes truth these days. But this one cannot be allowed to become an "alternative view."

And oh yeah. What Jed said.

And thanks to commenter russell1958 over at Firedoglake, for compiling tbe following list of terrorist attacks that took place in this country during the Bush years:

• 9/11/01


• Anthrax letters


• DC Snipers


• Grenade blasts outside U.K. embassy in New York


• Ohio sniper attacks


• Knoxville church shootings


• Arson attack on women's health clinic in Concord, NH (5/2000)


• Catholic priest who drove his car into the Northern Illinois Health Clinic then pulled out an ax before being shot at by a security guard; (9/2000)


• Bombing of Tacoma, Washington women's health clinic (6/2001)


• Anthrax hoax letters send by Clayton Waagner to 554 women's health clinics (11/2001)


• Arson attack on women's health clinic in Palm Beach (7/2005)


• Molotov cocktail thrown at women's health clinic in Shreveport, LA (12/2005


• David McMenemy of Rochester Hills, Michigan, crashed his car into the Edgerton Women’s Care Center in Davenport, Iowa, then doused the lobby in gasoline and started a fire (9/2006)


• Package left at a women’s health clinic in Austin, Texas, contained an explosive device capable of inflicting serious injury or death (4/2007)


• Planned Parenthood clinic in Virginia Beach, Virginia, set afire (12/2007)


• 20% of all women's health clinics in the U.S. attacked during 2008

Nope. No terrorism at all during the Bush years. Nosirree.

Is anyone actually surprised by this?

This is supposed to be Big!! Breaking!!! News!!!!!??? My reaction to this is a Cheneyesque "So?"

Why is anyone surprised by this:

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.

The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”

In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

Newsweek reported yesterday in a profile of Eric Holder that the Attorney General is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration's torture activities. That doesn't have me as excited as it does some of my compatriots, because the Justice Department is still lousy with Bush appointees, and I suspect any "investigation" will end in a proclamation of "bad activities done out of goodwill for our nation" and nothing will be done.

Ask those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks if "We kept America safe after 9/11" means anything to them

No, I don't think we should let up on Dick Cheney's claim that he "kept us safe after 9/11." Closing the barn door after the horse leaves, when you knew that door wasn't secure doesn't qualify you for a medal. An administration that came into power claiming that "the adults are now in charge" and then ignored (perhaps deliberately) warning after warning that something very big and very bad was about to happen has absolutely ZERO claim on "keeping us safe."

Now, former 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben Veniste, best known for asking Condoleeza Rice for reciting the title of the now infamous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing, has heard quite enough about how Dick Cheney's lunatic view of the universe "kept us safe" AFTER the Bush Adminitration's spectactular level of negligence:

In the interview with Bush, Ben-Veniste asked the president why he hadn't met with the FBI director after getting the PDB.

Bush replied that there were concerns predating his administration about politicizing the FBI and interfering in pending cases.

But "this was no pending case subject to claims of political interference," Ben-Veniste writes in his book.

The president said he couldn't recall whether he asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to get in touch with the FBI regarding the PDB, according to the book.

There was no immediate response from a spokesman for the former president to requests for comment.

Finally declassified by the Bush administration amid public and political pressure in April 2004, the PDB from Aug. 6, 2001 said, "The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden related." The PDB also said that the CIA and the FBI at the time were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates three months earlier saying that "a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

It's clear that Dick Cheney is now operating in accordance with his "One Percent Doctrine" -- that if there is a one percent chance that something is true, you proceed as if it were a foregone conclusion. In this case, given his daughter Liz' inadvertent revelation that her dad is crapping his pants at the thought that he might be prosecuted for his crimes, he probably feels that there is MORE than a one percent chance, even though so far the Obama Administration has been loath to even entertain the possibility. But as Cheney makes his Legacy Tour, and keeps repeating his safety claim, at what point do we actually start to look not at the post-9/11 record, when ANY administration would have stepped up to the plate, but at the time period between January 20 and September 10 2001, when warning after warning of an impending attack came in -- and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did nothing.

Nothing.

They. Did. Nothing.

The choice we have in our view of these criminals is simple: Were they simply stupid, utterly incompetent, or did they decide to let things play out so they could invade Iraq? Take your pick. Whichever you choose, it is completely inconsistent with Dick Cheney's public posture as Savior of America™.

At this point we have to ask ourselves: Is there ANYTHING the Bush Administration would not do?

First of all, let me make perfectly clear: I am not a "9/11 Truther", whatever that means. I'm not what Marc Maron calls an "Independent Speculative Investigator", poring over photos of 7 World Trade Center trying to prove that bombs were set by the Trilateral Commission, or whatever permutation of Twelve Jewish Bankers the black helicopter set (who were curiously quiet while all this was going on) can come up with.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess that the night of the attacks, when Larry Kudlow was on CNBC grinning from ear to ear and gleefully crowing about how this meant an end to any talk of a Social Security "lockbox", I did turn to Mr. Brilliant and say, "Oh my God, they did it" -- "they" meaning the Bush Administration. However, after I regained my faculties, it occurred to me that given the ineptitude of the Bush Administration up to that point, "they" weren't really capable of pulling something like this off.

As we found out more about what happened, and what the history, was, and how the stories got fishier and fishier, I became less willing to accept the "Nineteen guys with boxcutters did this, financed by Osama Bin Laden, and there was no way anyone could have foreseen this or prevented it" story. There was just too much that if you looked at what people who weren't getting the media coverage were saying, and too much that the media kept pushing under the rug and saying it wasn't significant, that just didn't fit with that explanation. As people like Richard Clarke and Coleen Rowley came forward, and as later on we heard about the infamous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing, I came around to the conclusion that the Bush Administration knew that something was going to happen, that it would happen soon, and that they decided to let it play out to their advantage. I don't think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney banked on almost 3000 deaths and the spectacle of the nation's pre-eminent skyscrapers toppling on national television, though that didn't hurt the agenda. But it became clear in the aftermath of the attacks, as the march towards war with Iraq became ever more relentless, that an attack on this country played to something that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld wanted very badly, and that was to go into Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.

During the last week, as I left the house every day at 6 AM to get to work for 7 AM conference calls, the idea for a post detailing a timeline that goes directly from the 2000 campaign, to the 2000 election theft, to 9/11, to Iraq, to the torture timeline that's now seeing the light of day, began forming in my head. The difficulty was going to be in finding the time to put together a coherent case that the Iraq fix was in very early on, and that the 9/11 attacks were the perfect excuse. Of course the other problem is how to do this without tinfoil, though the idea that an American executive branch is capable of forming policy based on outright lies and fabrications and committing atrocities for political or personal gain seems less crazy in the wake of the news we've had this week about how the Bush Administration used torture in an attempt to fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

Such a post would be a daunting task, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it. But I'm fortunate in that Dan K. over at the Great Orange Satan has done most of the post-9/11 work for me in the form of a "torture timeline", and I recommend that if you decide to read the rest of this post, you'll go over there and read what he has to say after you finish.

I'm not going to get into things like the connections between the Bush and Bin Laden family and other material covered in places like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. There are many places out there to find these things, they are out there, and while such things are certainly smoking guns, that's not where I'm headed, because they lead into the Alex Jones territory of "inside job", and that's not where I'm going here. I'm just looking to see how far back the obsession with Iraq goes, and whether it points not to an active inside job, but more a question of "Something's going to happen; let's just let it play out because it might be just what we need."

We already know of the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document from the neocon Project for the New American Century. The mythology surrounding this document is that it "calls for" a "second Pearl Harbor". But while the word "transformation" appears in this document even more often than the lunatic would-be ninja Benjamin "Coach" Wade uses the words "dragon" and "warrior" on Survivor: Tocantins this season, the document regards such a cataclysmic incident as not something to be deliberately implemented, but as a catalyst, were it to happen, for the transformation of this country into this big, paranoid, militarily badass, unpredictable bully that is the group's wet dream.

But let's go even further back, shall we?

Author Mickey Herskowitz, who ghost-wrote George W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep, has said that Bush was talking about invading Iraq as far back as 1999:

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

The entire Bush Presidency played out as a cautionary tale about what can happen if you don't resolve your issues with your parents. It's clear that Bush Jr.'s desire for the presidency was a twofold desire to please his father by bringing him the head of Saddam Hussein, and to outdo his father by "succeeding" where the father had "failed." It's unusual that a man gets to play out his daddy issues on an international stage, to such devastating effect, but once the 9/11 attacks occurred, at least where Bush fils was concerned, there was his opportunity.

So then we get to Dick Cheney being selected to vet Vice-Presidential candidates, and then choosing hismelf as the best candidate. It's difficult to imagine someone like Dick Cheney agreeing to be #2 to such a lightweight without getting something sizable in return, like a great deal of power. It's quite plausible that being very well familiar with the burden of daddy issues carried by the young wastrel who had chosen him to choose a running mate, Cheney, being no fool, and with Iraq being one of the states with which he'd become obsessed after the fall of the Soviet Union, saw his opportunity to direct policy the way he wanted.

The early months of the Bush Administration were hardly auspicious. There was the incident in which a Japanese fishing boat was sunk by a Navy sub being piloted by big Republican money donors, and the one in which a U.S. Navy spy plane landed in China after flying into Chinese airspace and colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The president who would later be known for never admitting a mistake ended up in an apology situation with the Chinese.

In July 2001, George W. Bush was already on the path that would lead to the economic collapse of 2007. Editorial, New York Times, July 7, 2001:

No sooner had George W. Bush become president than he began warning of an impending recession and campaigning for a huge tax cut. But he forgot -- or perhaps did not know -- that a slowing economy, with lower corporate profits and personal earnings, would automatically result in lower tax collections and throw his knife-edged fiscal plan into imbalance. So instead of residing peacefully in ''lockboxes'' for the next decade, the trust funds collected to cover baby boomers' Social Security and Medicare benefits may be tapped as early as this year. Mr. Bush gave up long-term fiscal discipline for short-term political gain, and the salad days of surpluses have transmogrified into the bad old days of budget bickering.

It all began in January. With a decade of budget surpluses ahead, Mr. Bush swore he could deliver a trillion-dollar tax cut while erasing the national debt and leaving the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare untouched for 10 years. But after Congress set its spending levels and passed Mr. Bush's tax cut, less than $10 billion worth of leeway was left in this year's budget before the government would have to pry open the lockboxes. Now, thanks to shrinking income tax revenues, that narrow margin of error is about to disappear.

By August, 2001, George W. Bush had decided that preznitin' was hard work, and that he needed a vacation. So off he went to his stage "ranch" in Crawford for the month of August. On August 7, 2001, one day after Bush received the now-infamous Presidential Daily Briefing that stated unequivocally that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S., the New York Times presciently opined:

Visitors to Mr. Bush's spread may see a brown, flat prairie relieved by a patch of canyons and woods off a creek, but to the president it is paradise. However, he would prefer that we think of him not so much as being on vacation as on retreat, refreshing his soul ''away from Washington, in the heartland of America.'' No doubt most Americans also are planning outings to ''celebrate some of the values that strengthen America,'' as the presidential counselor Karen Hughes said Mr. Bush would be doing.

[snip]

George W. Bush's aides say he plans a more leisurely pace at the ranch, in Crawford, than his father set -- jogging, bass fishing in a pond created by his own engineers, working out in his gym and getting national security briefings each day. It will be interesting to see which guests show up, with or without the ranchwear that Trent Lott, the Senate G.O.P. leader, gamely put on last year, picking up where Mr. Humphrey left off.

Not since Jimmy Carter vacationed in Plains, Ga., has a president chosen such a remote place for his holiday. Besides covering the announcements that Mr. Bush is working very hard, the media will have extensive opportunities to research feature stories on Crawford's $3 haircuts and its one gas station, and no stoplights.

Beware of presidents who expect uninterrupted holidays, however. Mr. Carter had to cut short a vacation in Hawaii to rush home and deal with gas lines during an energy crisis. Mr. Reagan flew back to Washington early because of the shooting down of a South Korean jetliner by Soviet fighters. Mr. Bush's father had his vacations spoiled by hurricanes, Saddam Hussein and an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.

We wish no crises on Mr. Bush, who takes his vacation after a string of victories or semi-victories with Congress on tax cuts, the patients' bill of rights, education and faith-based programs. But more may happen than sedate outings to celebrate American values in the heartland.

Indeed.

After Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, in which she insisted that the Administration had been front and center in terms of vigilance, Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post offered a different account from their sources:

President Bush was in an expansive mood on Aug. 7, 2001, when he ran into reporters while playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, Tex.

The day before, the president had received an intelligence briefing -- the contents of which were declassified by the White House Saturday night -- warning "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday.

"No mulligans, except on the first tee," he said to laughter. "That's just to loosen up. You see, most people get to hit practice balls, but as you know, I'm walking out here, I'm fixing to go hit. Tight back, older guy -- I hit the speed limit on July 6th."

[snip]

But if top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface. Bush spent most of August 2001 on his ranch here. His staff said at the time that by far the biggest issue on his agenda was his decision on federal funding of stem cell research, followed by education, immigration and the Social Security "lockbox."

Of course, many of the efforts to thwart an attack would not have been visible on the outside. But some officials on the inside -- notably former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke -- say the administration was not acting with sufficient urgency to the spike in intelligence indicating a threat. And there is nothing in Bush's public actions or words from August 2001 to refute Clarke.

During that month, Bush's top aides were concentrating on the president's political standing: His approval rating had slipped, his relations with Congress were tense, and Democrats had regained control of the Senate. The only time Bush mentioned terrorism publicly that month was in the context of violence in Israel.

Now think about what we now know: We know from the August 6 PDB that there was warning that something may very well be in the works, and nothing was done. We know that Coleen Rowley was prevented by the FBI from following up on Zacarias Moussaoui. We know via Ron Suskind that George Bush's response to the August 6 PDB was "All right. You've covered your ass, now" -- an odd thing for a president to say when handed a briefing that a strike against the U.S. may well be imminent. We know that George W. Bush had wanted to do something about Saddam Hussein long before he even took office. We know that 16 members of the Project for the New American Century were in the Bush Administration. We know that George W. Bush sat in a classroom for seven minutes after the planes hit the World Trade Center, despite having received the briefing that Osama Bin Laden was planning attacks against the U.S. We know that Dick Cheney urged George Bush to stay out of Washington the day of the attacks.

So now that I'm heading precariously close to the kind of tinfoil stuff that's been spewed all around the Web for nearly eight years, where am I going with all this? Well, Ron Suskind was on Rachel Maddow's show the other night, and paved the way for where I'm going:

MADDOW: You‘ve done a lot of reporting on the Bush administration‘s efforts to try to create, try to find some sort of link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda—for all the obvious political reasons in 2002 and 2003. How big of a development is it that these interrogation tactics were being used, in some cases, according to the Armed Services Committee report, these techniques were being used specifically to try to find that Iraq link?

SUSKIND: Well, it‘s fascinating. I heard some of that back when I was reporting the book, but I really couldn‘t confirm it and you need, you know, several sources confirming to put it in the book.

And what‘s fascinating here, if you run the timeline side by side, you see, really, for the first time from that report that the key thing being sent down in terms of the request by the policymakers, by the White House, is find a link between Saddam and al Qaeda so that we essentially can link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks and then march into Iraq with the anger of 9/11 behind us. That was the goal and that was being passed down as the directive.

It‘s, you know, it‘s often called the requirement inside the CIA for both agents with their sources and interrogators with their captives. “Here‘s what we‘re interested in, here‘s what we, the duly elected leaders, want to hear about. Tell us what you can find.”

What‘s fascinating, in the Senate report, is finally clear confirmation that that specific thing was driving many of the activities, and mind you, the frustration inside of the White House that was actually driving action. The quote, in fact, inside of the Senate report from a major said that as frustration built inside of the White House, that there was no link that was established—because the CIA told the White House from the very start there is no Saddam/al Qaeda link. We checked it out. We did every which way. Sorry.

The White House simply wouldn‘t take no for an answer and it went with another method. Torture was the method. “Get me a confession, I don‘t care how you do it.” And that bled all the way through the government, both on the CIA side and the Army side. It‘s extraordinary.

Mind you, Rachel, this is important. This is not about an impetus to foil an upcoming potential al Qaeda attacks. The impetus here is largely political diplomatic. The White House had a political diplomatic problem. It wanted it solved in the run-up to the war.

And mind you, and I think the data will show this—after the invasion, when it becomes clear in the summer, just a few months after in 2003, that there are no WMD in Iraq. That‘s the summer of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame—my goodness, there are no WMD. Now, the White House is being hit with a charge that they took us to war under false pretenses. That‘s when the frustration is acute.

My question, the question for investigators now: Is how many of these interrogations were driven specifically by a desire to come up with the Saddam/al Qaeda link? It‘s essentially rivers coming together.

We had in this country an Executive branch that was capable of torturing detainees not to save American lives, or to prevent another terrorist attack, or even because of some kind of delusion that what they watched on 24 every week was reality, not fiction. They tortured people because they wanted badly to connect Iraq with Al Qaeda in order to justify attacking Iraq. So, given that we now know just to what extent the Bush Administration would go to gin up a case for war -- a war that would kill over 4000 American troops and many multiples of thousands of Iraqis who did nothing to us, it becomes more difficult to dismiss out of hand the idea that some kind of cost/benefit analysis was done as intelligence came in during August 2001 and a decision made to let whatever it was play out.

I don't think even Dick Cheney bargained on the Twin Towers collapsing on national television, though I don't think it bothered him that much, given the benefit he stood to gain from America's horror at what happened. I think he figured on a couple hundred casualties at most. And what's a few hundred souls weighed against the chance to fulfill the neocon dream of taking out Saddam Hussein while the front man for the Administration would go along because it meant he could be the War Preznit he so desperately wanted to be, and to one-up his dad in the bargain?

The point of this post is not to rehash everything that's come out about the 9/11 attacks in the last eight years. But once the door has opened to the reality -- no longer allegations by liberal bloggers, but the reality -- that the Bush Administration endorsed torture, ordered torture, advocated torture, and ordered it to try to generate "fact-esque" information about an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, can we still say that there is a limit to what they would have done in pursuit of Saddam Hussein?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Special "Sayid on Lost can have a clear conscience after seeing what our own executive branch did" edition

Dispatches from around Blogtopia (™ Skippy):

At Bradblog, a long and thoughtful post by a man whose father was waterboarded by the Japanese during WWII: Says Ernest A. Canning: "...for the moment, if such practices are not finally brought to an end, once and for all, hopefully through accountability for those who justified them --- fixing the facts around the policy --- the President's promise that it won't happen again is little more than a vague wish."

Richard Blair warns us not to be distracted by the shiny object that is torture. The real issue is the Bush Administration's use of torture as a device to gin up a fake connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to try to justify their illegal war. This one's a must read. So is this one by Larisa Alexandrovna.

Digby gives us another reason to hate Chris Matthews.

Mark Karlin makes the case that premedited murder in the first degree would not be an outrageous charge against Bush officials.

Paul Krugman has a word for torturing people to fabricate a link between a country that did not attack us and an organization that did. (Hint: People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil">M. Scott Peck wrote about it, except that Peck believed in redemption, something that I don't think is possible for this bunch -- certainly not after watching Cheney sneer gleefully about the "good information" they got from torturing people.)

Ornery Bastard thanks Marcy Wheeler for being all over this story. (If you want one place to keep up with all this, you could do worse than bookmark Emptywheel over at FDL.

I'll have more on implications of the Bush Administration resorting to torture to gin up a case against Iraq immediately after the 9/11 attacks as soon as I have more than five minutes to do the research and put a post together. Put on your tinfoil chapeau, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out

Every day it is becoming more difficult for the Obama Administration to continue to embrace the appalling Peggy Noonan Doctrine of "just keep walking" where the Bush Administration's embrace of torture as a war tactic is concerned. Now that the OLC memos have been released, former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow has decided to speak up in Foreign Policy magazine:

1. The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.

Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time.

[snip]

There is an elementary distinction, too often lost, between the moral (and policy) question -- "What should we do?" -- and the legal question: "What can we do?" We live in a policy world too inclined to turn lawyers into surrogate priests granting a form of absolution. "The lawyers say it's OK." Well, not really. They say it might be legal. They don't know about OK.

[snip]

The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.

In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.

I remain unconvinced that there weren't ugly little corners of the Administration; the "You're with us or you're with the terrorist" crowd, who weren't thinking about exactly that possibility. But Zelikow's point about using lawyers as surrogate priests is, to my mind, the crux of the matter. The Bush Administration, and yes, the Obama Administration, are hiding behind lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee to exonerate them from any kind of wrongdoing. "The lawyers said it was OK." What's appalling to me is that there is NOTHING in the psyches of these men that said "Wait a minute, this is really ugly stuff." You have to be a sick, twisted, sadistic psychopath to waterboard someone, no matter how odious he is, 183 times in one month -- and still think you can take any kind of moral high road.

For over a decade, we've heard the right wing talk about morality, but only in the context of private sexual behavior. It didn't start with the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about a blowjob in a private civil case, but it gained critical mass with the impeachment. What this focus on sexuality allowed the right wing to do is to reframe all notions of morality into the context of what individuals do in their bedrooms. So as long as morality could be put into this very small box, when it came time for the Bush Junta to go to war, anything they wanted to do was fair game. Because the lawyers -- the same lawyers Republicans rail against during their campaigns -- said it was OK.

Zelikow spoke with Rachel Maddow last night:

Meanwhile, elsewhere at General Electric, Chuck Todd has shown that he's willing to embrace the torturers as part of the hazing process to become an entrenched, inside-the-beltway good ol' boy:

There does seem to be a little bit of a reaction to how this was received on the left. And the president, when he went on in those comments, Andrea, to suggest that he'd be open to some sort of special commission that was bipartisan, you know, he said, on one hand said he's worried about the process getting politicized, and frankly this feels like a political food fight now. Vice President Cheney on one side, President Obama on the other. The hard left, the hard right, fighting over this in the blogosphere. When he talks about - he fears the politicization - that may be too late, so the compromise might be, and the president basically comes out and endorses it in that photo op, questioning that he got there, which is a special commission to look into this but it opens up all sorts of doors on when legal opinions matter and all that. That is just -- this is some touchy situation, issues having to do with legal opinions, the constitution, it's a real tightrope. And the political pressure on both sides is intense.

This is what passes for political analysis in the Washington press corps these days. A moral question like torture is reduced to a political food fight between warring political parties. And note Chuck Todd's use of the term "Vice President Cheney" instead of "Former Vice President Cheney" -- as if Cheney were still very much in office (which given Cheney's claim that he has "ordered" release of documents that will show all the "good information" he got from feeding his dark soul with the screams of the tortured may very well be true). That is the third time yesterday I heard Dick Cheney referred to this way.

The Beltway crowd can paint this as a "fringe blogger" vs. the forces of All That is Good and Holy all they want to; it doesn't change the fundamental fact: We are no longer a nation with any moral authority. We are Saddam Hussein. We are North Vietnam in the 1960's. We are the Japanese during WWII, the same Japanese that WE tried and convicted for using the very same techniques that are now deemed by Bush's psychopathic lawyers to be perfectly acceptable.

The right loves to talk about religion as being necessary for morality. It kind of makes me wonder what kind of fight we're in when the religion that our leaders invoke can allow them to think that torture is an intrinisic good when WE do it.

I wish I had time to look into this more thoroughly

With three 7 AM teleconferences over the next three days, it's going to be kind of light blogging around here. Here's how it works most days: I get up at 5 AM, have coffee and check out what Buzzflash is aggregatiing. Then I take a quick gander at the New York Times and some other sites, then decide what to take on during the slightly-over-an-hour that I have before getting ready to go to work.

I've been reading a bit about this business with Rep. Jane Harman being wiretapped talking to some AIPAC guy who may or may not be an Israeli spy. This whole thing seems to have originated with this article at CQ Politics, and those who have the time in the morning to dig into such things because someone pays them to do so instead of braving New Jersey highways and spending the day as a cube rat have been on the case this week here, here, here, and here.

But what really got my paranoid little brain going was when Greg Sargent, who is well-known in SANE circles as a go-to guy for the straight poop, gave voice to one of the larger implications of this story, which is that Jane Harman may very well have successfully lobbied the New York Times to NOT publish a big expos&eeacute; they had ready about George W. Bush's illegal surveillance program right before the 2004 election -- a story that given how close that election was, may very well have tipped the scales away from Captain Codpiece had more voters known what their president was doing to them.

Sargent explains:

So Dem Rep Harman appears to have worked behind the scenes to dissuade publication of a blockbuster expose about Bush that could have put her own party’s nominee in the White House and changed the history of the last four years. And, according to Keller, she apparently did this at the request of Michael Hayden, Bush’s National Security Agency chief.

My impression is that there's another aspect to this story, having to do with some kind of deal that Harman may have cut with Bush Administration officials to reduce charges against these AIPAC guys in return for support for the Administration's wiretap program.

And did I mention that Jane Harman is a DEMOCRAT? With allies like this, who needs opposition?

Anyway, unfortunately I don't have time to keep up with this, so I'm going to have to kick you over to Greg Sargent for updates.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Special Permanent Blot on our National Reputation Edition

This is one of those mornings when I really want to write something and there's just no gray matter left. That's why I left it to Mr. Olbermann, who isn't waist deep in what sometimes feels like the equivalent of jumping into second year medical school with nothing but a tech school certificate in air conditioner repair, to opine on the Bush Administration torture memos released yesterday by the Obama Administration -- right before telling us that they don't plan to do a damn thing about them.

I still think that there was some sort of agreement hatched between the two administrations between the election and January 20th -- something along the lines of "We'll go quietly and not tell the country that the economy is too dire to risk a change of leadership, and in return you won't prosecute us." But that's just me. My brain is too busy trying to absorb the difference between hematology blood chemistry and how the hell we're going to lay out the form that captures study drug dose changes so that I can present it at a teleconference this morning so that I don't look like someone they just pulled off the street to deal with oncology data capture to even try to imagine what justification there can be for saying about now-known criminals, "We know they committed the most heinous of crimes, but we have to just look ahead." I mean, I can't even get out of a parking ticket by saying that, and Barack Obama wants to let a bunch of buys who are so evil that they clearly got a thrill, perhaps even a sexual one, off of torturing people they captured, off the hook.

I recognize that the Bush Junta left a mess the magnitude of which I don't think we even know yet, and perhaps Barack Obama does, and there's only so much that even SuperPresident can do at once. There's also this little problem of the "ZOMG THERE'S A BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE" crowd who for some reason have adopted the slang of gay sex for their anti-government demonstrations after being silent for eight years while George Bush and Dick Cheney used the language of patriotism to spit on the Constitution. There's also this little matter of the media, which is predisposed to want to topple any Democratic president while giving a Republican one a free pass to commit the most heinous violations of everything humans hold decent. But perhaps the reason George Will is reduced to admonishing wealthy Americans to stop wearing blue jeans because it's unseemly is because there is just nothing in movement conservatism to defend anymore. The cerebral conservatism of William Buckley became the party of Dick Cheney and torture and is now the party of tantrum-throwing attention hogs like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, and teabaggers screaming about high taxes after theirs are cut.

So here I am, it's Friday, I'm wondering if I can just maybe spend the weekend cleaning my house instead of sitting in front of my work computer, and there just aren't words for what the government we employed for the past eight years is about to get away with.

So I'm kicking it over to some more inspired people, starting with Jonathan Turley on Rachel Maddow's show last night:

If you read nothing else about what our government did, read Digby here, here, and here.

Glenn Greenwald reprints some of the memos.

Stephen Reynolds wonders why the Bush Administration didn't get its inspiration from Indiana Jones movies (because sometimes you have to get your Roberto Benigni on or you'll scream).

Alex Koppelman offers links to the documents themselves and holds out a shred of hope that even though underlings won't be prosecuted (and I thought the Nuremburg trials did away with the "I was just following orders" defense) the Bush Administration officials who ordered it might. Note to Alex Koppelman: don't hold your breath.

It seems that I'm not the only one rendered at least temporarily speechless by what our government did, and by the current president's unwillingness to put justice ahead of temporary political expediency....either that or my progressive compatriots are still digesting how to respond in a way that doesn't throw Barack Obama under the bus but tries to find a way to demonstrate that he DOES have the political support, if he just turns off Morning Schmegegge and stops listening to Mike Barnicle and Pat Buchanan and Wolf Blitzer, for doing what a good Constitutional law professor should do. Ordinarily I find the Firedoglake folks rapidly joining the pull-up-the-ladder-behind-them brigade, but at least they're not ignoring the fact that the president we elected is about to let his predecessor get away with war crimes.

Thursday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Tonight's honoree: Keith Olbermann:

He's Back...The Return of Elliot Spitzer....

Elliot Spitzer is back and hes talking. The thought of this, no doubt, brings a small shiver to the boardrooms of some of the perps walking around trying to figure out how to hide the money this week. Today Edward Liddy testified that there have been death threats made to or about executives who received bonuses, so no names will be put on the record, but these anonymous players must know that the jig is up in the land of easy-money. Isn't what to do a no-brainer for these great Americans?

Spitzer may be as "disgraced" as any anonymous sex loving Republican loser, but America is known for its great second acts, and we may be witnessing the curtain rising on Spitzer's.
Today in Slate Elliot Spitzer has a short op-ed that speaks volumes about what is going on, and indirectly, if you follow the money, what happened to him. Plainly stated, Spitzer brings the AIG Ponzi Scheme one step closer to the revered establishment when he explains how the bailout money was funneled straight into the top players, with Goldman Sachs being the name that comes up again and again. These top players already got bailout money, and Goldman is looking at zero losses at this point, while regular Americans are being asked to make concessions or just plain losing everything. here are the biggest financial entities in the world, making billions on what appears to have been nothing but air traded back and forth, and having gutted the American people they are walking away with 100% return to their stockholders. In return AIG seems to think that its appropriate to pay themselves bonuses with the leftover funds. This leaves AIG still a wobbly shell with no plan of how to go forward, and the threat of the collapse of all of the world's financial markets still up in the air. So, what was all that bailout money for? Apparently to make sure that no one at Goldman or the other few top firms in the hand-out-line lost anything!

The relationship between AIG and Goldman goes back long enough that one would think that Goldman would know, having bought so much of this "insurance" or whatever it was, whether the "products" were ...er...real or feasible at all. Indeed, Goldman and AIG almost merged a few years ago, but Spitzer notes that the unknown black hole of AIG's business practices were probably what prevented it. Still, that didn't stop the incestuous dealings; it almost makes one think that this whole thing was a setup.

This is country that Spitzer is familiar with; he has been a terrible liability to entities that, under the Bush administration, were allowed to literally gut the country and its citizens. All of this seems to have been part of the Bush Administration's own Ponzi Scheme, which figured that the illusion of an ownership society, terrified of the "terraism" and steeped in the me, me, me, culture would look the other way while they finished clearing out the vault. Beyond that, it's clear that the media hyped housing bubble encouraged the house flip mentality and the idea that anyone could be rich. The idea of the lottery dropping on our own heads made us more protective of the rich, because we might one day be one....or look, we could be one with no money down, if we could just balance that on this, and flip that house!!

Every week came a new offer from our bank or credit card to just put the enclosed check into the bank for a $50,000 loan, unsecured and with a low APR!! Who would know that those same banks would go out of their way to cause a day or week default by changing the cycle or stopping refusing cards that went over-limit, in order to charge fees and raise the rates. Who could know that the fine print on all those little fliers talking about privacy rights and how they are selling all of our information, also said that by-the-way the interest rate is now 25% and the minimum payment has tripled! Default on that and likely AIG has sold insurance to your lending institution that should repay them for making the bad loan in the first place....no money down mortgages? No problem....its the same story. This is the ownership society and we all need to own alot of stuff. It is... what did he say?...uniquely American!

Spitzer was questioning this back in February 2008 when he wrote his Valentine to predatory lenders in the Washington Post. He detailed that Attorneys General across the country had entered into litigation in an attempt to protect the people of their states from predatory lending. The response from the federal government was astounding!

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

snip

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Now, they will say that they fought the consumer protection laws to actually protect the consumers and assure that they could get credit in the future. But actually, Americans could get credit; just credit that they were able to handle and could, by reasonable standards, pay back. This was just more of the same in hindsight. Looking back that all that the Bush administration has done, the beginnings of this disaster looks almost quaint, and not like an institutionalized foray into the dirty underside of criminal activity. There were quotas passed by the government as to who got the loans and the focus was on certain populations who would be helped into homeownership even if they couldn't maintain the credit. It was treated as some sort of fulfillment of the American Dream for people to own something, but really had more to do with the insurance on the loans than the people involved. The American dream is dead, as we well know, but what it was, way back then, was that people could afford to own a house and put their kids in college!

AIG sold insurance to the biggest entities in the financial world to cover the proliferation of bad loans. This insurance became so common that it was impossible that the lions of finance didn't somehow have an inkling that something was wrong. Didn't Goldman and the rest of these huge firms know something about the stability of an impossible business plan? Hadn't Goldman gone over everything in their bid to merge? And what of the government and their mandating of certain loans that were bound to go bad. There were people involved in these things, and its not like regular people understand the ins and outs of the financial industry. They rely on brokers to explain it to them. But these brokers were being forced to see a certain product to an unqualified population. How could they? Why would they? Those are questions for another time.

Spitzer has been fighting these guys and asking questions all along. Coincidentally, right after the WSJ editorial appeared on Valentine's Day 2008, Spitzer was caught up in what was an extremely unusual sting. So unusual is an investigation like this that it seems almost like it was a set-up; and considering where it all came from and how it all came down, it might well have been.

It seems that Spitzer's bank was investigating expenses under the auspices of the newer Homeland Security laws of the Bush administration. Greg Palast wrote about this compellingly, and in light of how the whole thing is shaking out now, and what Spitzer said back then about this financial mess and what he tried to DO about it, Palast had a pretty good early grasp on what had gone down. So now, with Spitzer poking his head up from the underground of "healing his family," at this most compelling of moments, its probably worthwhile for Americans to screw their heads on straight and forget the details of the hooker, and look at what Spitzer was working on when he was taken down. We might all find ourselves wanting to thank the egotistical crime fighter who cant keep it in his pants.

I am no apologist for breaking the law, and usually its the highest and mightiest that fall the hardest. But when the mainstream is showing us the shiny object, we must resist the temptation to succumb to our base natures and try to see the bigger picture. There was never a real case against Elliot Spitzer, and no charges were filed. The release of embarrassing personal information was at the discretion of the Bush Administration's Justice Department.

Why was this information released? It wasn't that he was a crusader against such crimes, because many who have been caught were exactly the same and their information has been kept quiet. It wasn't that the press is all so great in their investigative journalism, either...because we know they're loathe to get off their asses if they can just read a talking point; as is evidenced by the reportage on this case.

Palast:

Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It’s up to something called “prosecutorial discretion.”

Funny thing, this ‘discretion.’ For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him in diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him.
Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made at the ‘discretion’ of Bush’s Justice Department.

Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'

Bush's Justice Department.
Its clear to me that all things being equal, this was at the very least, not a transsexual streetwalker a la Hugh Grant, and it was all very ho-hum and quiet. So, whatever the problem that leads to this sort of behavior, I don't want to know about it...its personal, so just walk on by...nothing to see here.



Welcome back Elliot Spitzer. I hope we hear more from you very soon...your voice is needed in this matter.


c/p RIP Coco