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.
Michael Mukasey has insulted the United States Senate once again. When asked by Senators whether he will consider, as Attorney General, the horrific act of waterboarding to be a form of torture, Mukasey has refused to answer over and over again - three times now, by my count.
Mukasey’s latest refusal to answer the question comes in this form: Mukasey says he will decide whether to count waterboarding as torture after the United States Senate confirms him as Attorney General. Then he’ll let the Senate know the answer to the question.
That’s an answer in itself. It’s clear that Michael Mukasey intends to continue the practice of torturing prisoners by waterboarding, authorizing the torture, and claiming that it doesn’t break the many laws against torture, merely by declaring that waterboarding is, in fact, not torture.
That’s like saying that decapitation is not murder, and then saying that, while the government may chop people’s heads off, it does not murder.
George W. Bush’s pick for Attorney General has, in effect, declared that he intends to help the President continue to break the law.
Michael Mukasey must not be confirmed as Attorney General.
German car salesman Khaled Masri was kidnapped by the United States government, flown to American occupied Afghanistan, kept prisoner there for months and tortured. Yet, the five right wing justices on the United States Supreme Court, led by John Roberts, decided that they would refuse to hear his case.
In doing so, they implicitly agreed that the President of the United States can kill any lawsuit against the United States government whenever he wants to. All the President has to do is claim that state secrets are involved, without providing any evidence at all that this is the case.
In effect, this decision not to hear the case of Khaled Masri gives the President the power to do as he wishes, without being subject to the law.
This decision allows the President of the United States.
The Supreme Court of the United States has failed to protect the Constitution and the rule of law in the United States. The court has proven that it is in no sense an impartial judicial body, but has become a branch of the Republican Party.
The Supreme Court will do nothing to protect our rights, nothing to return America to a state in which constitutionally-guaranteed liberties are respected, nothing to hold the power of the President in check.
Americans have no course left but impeachment… but will Congress act?
Don’t hold your breath.
It looks like the rule of law only applies to the little people in America. For the power elites like George W. Bush, it’s anything goes.
“Even as the government was publicly denouncing torture, our client Majid Khan and others were being subjected to it.” - Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights
Today, the world learned that, even though George W. Bush claimed to have closed all his secret black site prisons last year, the prisons were in fact kept open, and prisoners of war were kept there in secret in clear violation of international law, and in violation of the laws that the United States Congress has passed binding the Executive Branch of the American federal government to those international laws.
Also, after the Bush White House told the American people that it would stop torturing prisoners, it drafted a secret legal opinion authorizing yet more torture.
Torture is a crime. Holding prisoners of war without charge in secret prisons with no access to the Red Cross or to any other supervision, without giving prisoners any rights, and interrogating them beyond the reach of all supervision, is a crime.
George W. Bush has been caught red handed committing war crimes. Those are high crimes - what the Constitution declares as ground for impeachment.
Will the Democrats in Congress continue to cower and shuffle their feet while pretending not to know what is going on?
The time has come to impeach, impeach,
impeach,
impeach Bush!
The abuses by Blackwater USA are even worse than previously thought, and rival Abu Ghraib in their impact, a new report by the House Committee on Government Oversight shows.
Congress has discovered not just the one incident of Blackwater mercenaries killing Iraqi civilians that had been guessed at, but 195 separate incidents of violent abuse or murder against Iraqis just in the last year and a half.
That’s an average of 1.4 war crimes per week. And those are just the ones by Blackwater mercenaries. And those are just the ones after January, 2006. And those are just the ones that have been discovered so far.
Furthermore, Congress has discovered that the Bush Administration knew about these war crimes, and that the State Department, led by Condoleeza Rice, told Blackwater to make payoffs in order to cover up the incidents.
If covering up war crimes is not an impeachable offense, nothing is.
The latest news of criminal behavior by George W. Bush:
In 2003, at least a month before starting the war in Iraq, President George W. Bush got a message from Saddam Hussein in which Hussein offered to step down from power and go into exile.
George W. Bush refused the offer of peace!
Furthermore, Bush kept the offer secret from the American people. In a transcript of Bush talking with the Spanish Prime Minister, Bush admits getting the offer, but says that he plans to invade Iraq no matter what offers are made.
That’s proof that Bush planned to start his war regardless of whether the war was necessary. Bush didn’t just lie about weapons of mass destruction. Bush didn’t just lie about a false international threat from Iraq. Bush didn’t just lie about a link between Al Quaida and Iraq. Bush lied about the need to go to war to deal with any of those false threats.
Bush told us all that Saddam Hussein was refusing to back down, when in fact, Bush knew very well that Hussein had already offered to back down!
The war was absolutely unnecessary, and America has been crippled as a result of Bush’s lust for war, insisting on going to war despite all lack of need.
Bush withheld this information from Congress and the American people because he knew that if we knew that Hussein was offering to resign and leave Iraq, no one would support going to war.
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You, the person reading this article - How much more of this are you going to take? How many more lies and crimes from the President of the United States will you accept without doing anything about it? What will it take for you to finally make a stand?
So the House of Representatives has managed to pass a resolution that doesn’t actually change anything, but only makes a comment on a small part of the tactics of the Bush White House in fighting the Iraq War. Big deal.
The fighting in Iraq has included serious war crimes on the part of the United States that appear to have been pushed all the way from the top. Those crimes have wrecked international law and ripped gaping holes in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Passing a toothless resolution on a short-lived strategy within the war is as pointless as whistling a happy tune in the middle of a tornado. The debate has already gone far beyond where the Democrats in Congress are willing to admit.
The American people know the war was a fraud. The American people know the war is a failure. The American people want to war to be ended. The want it to be ended now, not after another thousand Americans are killed.
It is time to vote to end the war, to rescind President Bush’s authority to engage in military action in Iraq.
Then, when that vote is taken, it will be time to vote to impeach Bush and Cheney.
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.
