Today, America learned that the CIA took videotapes of the torture of people kept prisoner by the President of the United States, and then destroyed them. When a federal judge asked to see the videotapes, the CIA lied to the judge and said that the videotapes never existed.
The videotapes could have been used as evidence of prosecutorial misconduct in a criminal trial, and were destroyed in order to prevent the torture from ever being known by the American public.
But, will anyone in the CIA be held responsible? Will George W. Bush be impeached?
No, no, certainly not. After all, the news was released on a Friday, and very few Americans were in the mood to pay attention to serious things. Tomorrow, there shall be college football, and the day after that, the NFL games, and then, by Monday it will be mostly forgotten.
Justice will rot underneath our feet, and nothing will be done to stop it.
The Washington Post reported this news this morning: “Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.”
What the HELL is wrong with the Senate Democrats? Why are they even negotiating with George W. Bush on the renewal of the Protect America Act?
Senate Democrats should just say NO. No renewal of the Protect America Act. Let it expire. In fact, kill it now. All of it.
Don’t these Democrats understand why George W. Bush wants retroactive legal immunity for telecommunications corporations for warrantless electronic spying against American citizens?
Congress has just learned from the former CEO of Qwest that George W. Bush had begun his illegal spying on Americans’ telephone calls - warrantless wiretapping - half a year before the attacks of September 11! There is absolutely no security justification for this espionage against American citizens. It was a crime, a high crime, an impeachable crime, pure and simple.
George W. Bush wants retroactive legal immunity for AT&T, Verizon and Bell South, corporations known to have helped Bush engage in his illegal spying against Americans, because George W. Bush himself has become a criminal suspect. George W. Bush is using the Protect America Act to protect himself from being impeached and going to prison. The Protect America Act ought to be renamed the Protect Bush’s Ass Act.
Shame on the Senate Democrats for going along with this charade. They ought to be coming together to impeach Bush, not give him immunity for crimes against the American people.
When presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich heard the news last week that government spy satellites will now be used by domestic law enforcement to track American citizens, he did not wait to express his outrage. Kucinich made a strong statement denouncing the plan by John Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, that federal, state, and local law enforcement officials will now be able to gain access to U.S. military spy satellites in order to track the movements of American citizens.
The government acknowledges that, as part of the program, police will be able to use special government spy aircraft that can scan at wavelengths that allow the aircraft to actually see people inside of buildings, and even in underground bunkers. This is like the American government using U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union, only against American citizens on American soil, and using technology generations ahead of what U2 had available.
Dennis Kucinich was right on in his condemnation of this new program to expand the government’s programs to spy against American citizens far beyond the Constitution’s restriction of reasonable search and seizure. Kucinich points out that the program clearly violates the Posse Comitatus Act by using the might of the military, which is supposed to be aimed against foreign countries, as a law enforcement weapon against American civilians.
It’s a frightening thought that we now cannot even count on being free from the snooping eyes of our own government, not even when we’re out in the middle of nature. There will always be an eye in the sky, watching us. Kucinich said of this new government spying program, “Not only are they ramping up their attempts to lie and deceive this nation into another war, they are also using those lies and deceptions to justify creating a police state right here where everyone is under suspicion and everyone is secretly under surveillance from Big Brother in the sky.”
Kucinich is right. America is turning into a Big Brother police state.
Jim over at Irregular Times points out a huge coincidence between the legislation of the Protect America Act, as crafted by the Bush White House in cooperation with Congress, and the language being used by the White House legal team that is fighting efforts by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and by the governments of Vermont, Missouri, Connecticut, Maine and New Jersey to make public the extent to which the federal government is using the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ online activities.
Both the Protect America Act and the Bush legal effort to block exposure of its giant Internet espionage database are focused on the effort to redefine the meaning of “electronic surveillance” in order to legally protect people in the Bush White House.
Why is the Protect America Act so strikingly parallel with the effort to block the lawsuits from the state governments and EFF, if there is not a relationship?
The combination of the chronological coincidence and the strategic coincidence of these two efforts to push electronic spy programs is quite odd… unless the Protect America Act is really about an attempt to keep the American people from finding out about the new equivalent of a fully operational Total Information Awareness program.
One thing is for sure - the more I look at the Protect America Act, the more clear it becomes that there’s something truly dark and rotten lying underneath it - and it isn’t terrorism.
The more you take a look at the Protect America Act, the less it makes sense. There is no impending threat of terrorist attack. The Bush White House admits that. Yet, George W. Bush all of a sudden says that he needs huge new spy powers to be legalized, and he needs these spy powers now, not a month from now.
Well, if there is no impending terrorist threat of attack this summer, what are these new spy powers for, and why did he need them within less than a month?
The mystery of the Protect America Act is this: What is happening during the scheduled recess of Congress that George W. Bush needed extraordinary newly legalized spy powers for?
One possible answer: The new law is about a resurrection of Total Information Awareness, a program that was supposed to have been stopped years ago, designed to bring private electronic information from multiple resources, including intercepted Internet traffic, into one gigantic computer database.
Originally, that database was to be housed at DARPA, in an office run by John Poindexter, of Iran Contra infamy. However, when the Total Information Awareness project was discovered, it was moved over to the National Security Agency.
Put one and one together, now. Who has been doing the warrantless “wiretapping” partially exposed within the Bush Administration? The National Security Agency.
What kind of information was going through that center? Web traffic, email, telephone calls, and a lot of it. Klein explained in an interview with Frontline: “…billions of bits of data going in and out every second every day. So all the Web surfing you’re doing, whatever you’re doing on the Internet — the pictures, the video, the Voice over Internet — all that stuff’s going in and out of there. And then of course there’s also the traditional phone switch, which is doing what it’s been doing since before the Internet.”
This web page you’re reading now is likely routed through that center, or another one like it, possibly with another National Security Agency splitter like the one that Mark Klein saw. Welcome to the NSA.
It just so happens that about two dozen lawsuits are going through the courts trying to force the Bush Administration to reveal the extent to which it is using the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ Internet use.
Right before George W. Bush started his desperate push to force Congress to pass the Protect America Act, the government’s effort to block one of those cases was denied. That was July 24. There is no mention of a need to revise the FISA regulations on electronic spying against Americans until the day after that.
Search Google News on July 22 or 23rd for FISA. You’ll come up with news about the FISA World Rowing Competition. It’s around noontime on July 25th, the day after the case brought by 5 state governments’ to get information about the NSA supercomputer Internet spy network was advanced a vital step forward in the courts, that we see the start of the push to pass the Protect America Act.
The headline on July 25th from United Press International: Boehner backs bill to beef up FISA. The article refers to the first draft of the Protect America Act, introduced by Heather Wilson… on July 24th, the same day that the court judgment against the Bush Administration came down.
The timing is too coincidental to avoid suspicion. We don’t know what goes on in secrecy. That’s why it’s called secrecy. However, what we can see is enough to judge that there’s a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to the passage of the Protect America Act.
All across America, Democratic politicians who thought that they were being clever by supporting the infamous Military Commissions Act, which gives President Bush legal amnesty preventing prosecution for war crimes, are finding out that they made a big mistake. Grassroots Democrats and progressive independents are rejecting calls that they ought to support turncoat Democratic politicians like Senator Debbie Stabenow and Congressman Sherrod Brown, in a growing movement that may just make the difference on Election Day.
In Delaware, progressive Democrats are calling upon voters to reject incumbent Democratic Senator Tom Carper, who voted in favor of the Military Commissions Act, and write in the name of Karen E. Peterson instead. When Tom Carper voted for the Military Commissions Act, he voted for torture, for an end to habeas corpus, for the destruction of the Geneva Conventions, for kangaroo courts, and for giving George W. Bush the power of a dictator. Delaware Democrats seem to think that Tom Carper has finally gone too far, and reject Carper’s growing embrace of the Republican agenda.
In Upstate New York, Democrat Michael Arcuri is running for the House of Representatives is in a tight race against Republican Ray Meier. Mike Arcuri may have made a fatal mistake, however, when he announced that he supports the Military Commissions Act. It got even worse for Arcuri when he admitted that he chose to support the Military Commissions Act even though he never actually read the text of the law to find out what it does.
The result? Democrats who once supported Michael Arcuri’s campaign for Congress backed away from him, withholding donations, refusing to volunteer for him, and in some cases, deciding to withhold their votes as well. Democratic bloggers either announced their opposition to the Arcuri for Congress campaign, or just stopped writing about Michael Arcuri at all. The following two online videos show the kind of anger Michael Arcuri provoked when he announced his support for the Military Commissions Act.
- Create a secret committee appointed by Bush and Rumsfeld that has the power to declare any person, even a US citizen, to be an enemy, instantly depriving them of their legal rights
- Revoke habeas corpus
- Revoke protection of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions
- Allow police to search your home without a search warrant
- Give amnesty to war criminals and protect George W. Bush from being impeached for any war crimes he has committed
- Allow for people to be put on trial in front of a military tribunal - even if they aren’t in any military, and have not engaged in military attacks against the USA
- Make it legal for the government to use testimony extracted through torture and end the legal right to be protected from forced self-incrimination
- Allow the government to imprison people without telling them what crimes they are being charged with
- Allow the government to convict people of crimes on the basis of secret evidence that the accused never sees and remove the right of the accused to cross-examine witnesses
- Allow for the records of trials to be kept secret from the American public
- Revoke away the right to a speedy trial
- Enable trials to begin even before a thorough investigation of the alleged crime has taken place
Please, call the offices of your United States Senators today and implore them to oppose the passage of S 3930
I’ll put this plainly: Senator John McCain and George W. Bush are lying about their new torture law. Here’s the truth. Don’t believe me? Read the law yourself.
1. The law would remove the right of habeas corpus. That means that, whatever laws are in place protecting the other legal rights of people imprisoned by the federal government, they have no practical effect. After all, if a prisoner does not have the right to be legally acknowledged by the judicial system of the United States, then that prisoner has no legal access to any legal protections at all. This measure endorses the international system of CIA prisons established by George W. Bush.
2. The new version of the legislation actually provides fewer legal protections for people than the earlier version proposed by Bush did. Don’t believe me? Believe the Washington Post, which runs the story on its front page this morning: Detainee Legislation to Have Fewer Restrictions.
3. The legislation takes away the right to a speedy trial.
4. The legislation removes the freedom to choose not to incriminate oneself. That freedom is guaranteed to all people, citizen and non-citizen alike, in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights.
5. The legislation would deprive people of the right to know what why they are being imprisoned, including what criminal charges are being made against them. Section 810, article 10 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice states that “When any person subject to this chapter is placed in arrest or confinement prior to trial, immediate steps shall be taken to inform him of the specific wrong of which he is accused and to try him or to dismiss the charges and release him.” The McCain - Bush legislation would nullify Section 810, article 10 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
6. The McCain / Bush legislation would permit the use of testimony that was forced from prisoners through the use of torture. That’s currently prohibited, even in military trials, by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Section 831 d, which reads, “No statement obtained from any person in violation of this article, or through the use of coercion, unlawful influence, or unlawful inducement may be received in evidence against him in a trial by court-martial.” The new law removes this protection. Torture away!
7. Under the new law, prisoners could be put on trial on criminal charges even before an investigation into the charges took place! Section 832 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice makes this guarantee: “No charge or specification may be referred to a general court-martial for trial until a through and impartial investigation of all the matters set forth therein has been made.” What kind of criminal trial could you have before an investigation into the charges has been made? the trial of a kangaroo court, that’s what. A kangaroo court is just what John McCain, George W. Bush and Ray Meier have proposed.
8. Under the new law, prisoners will not have the right to cross-examine witnesses against them. In the new system, someone can testify against you and you’ll never have the opportunity to question or refute what the witness claims.
9. Have you heard that the new “compromise” legislation guarantees protection under the Geneva Conventions? John McCain says it does. John McCain is lying. Here’s verbatim text from the new law: “Geneva Conventions Not Establishing Source of Rights- No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights.”
