Obama turns a blind eye to Bush era Crimes & Criminals

There is a growing upset at the Obama Administrations seeming refusal to investigate the potential crimes of the Bush Administration. Some feel the past is the past we should look towards the future. They dismiss the proverbial wisdom of George Santayana who said: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

We should be studying the blunders of the Bush Administration, such as Cheney's belief that deficit spending is good, or the decision to borrow from China to help finance the war in Iraq - among other missteps.

But in authorizing torture we are dealing with criminal activity. Will we have to wait for the next President after Obama to open up a `Cold Case Squad' in their attorney general's office to deal with this?




OBAMA CHANGES MIND ON PICTURE RELEASE

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Wednesday that he would fight to prevent the release of photographs documenting abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by United States military personnel, reversing his position on the issue after commanders warned that the images could set off a deadly backlash against American troops.



So much for the promise of transparency. It isn't that the world hasn't seen pictures of US cruelty to prisoners, or has not heard of the `torture memo. What happened last time when pictures came out is that individuals were punished. One is led to believ that if those pictures hadn't come out that the perpetrators would not have been punished.

Rachel Maddow Grills Colin Powell on Torture Authorization In Bush Admin.




For Balance: Here is a response from a man objecting to a signing a petition calling on Congress to press for an investigation:


Alex Mitchell (Milwaukee, WI) wroteon April 19, 2009 at 10:55am
I won't do it. Common man. We can't go to their level. This action would gridlock Obama's Presidency. How bout we let the ACLU do this, and they are working on it. Why start a political war right now, we have to fix the economy. Besides, Putting a guy in a box with a catapiler, smacking a guy, and all the other crap isn't torture! What the Japanese did to their prisoners was torture. What the Germans did to their prisoners was torture. The Serbs, Latin American captures and their prisoners was torture. Starving them to death, whippings, murder, caneing, all those are torture. I'd agree that waterboarding is a form of torture but it is weak as opposed to torture that has happened. Ask Nick Burg if he knows what torture is. Having your head sawed off, is torture. While we gave them sleep deprivation....ohhhh big deal. Look Bush is already considered one of the worst Presidents of all time. History will judge him. Obama doesn't need this from the left. STAND DOWN! You will open the door for the GOP to say, "look they arent about results, they are about political payback!"! He met you halfway buddy. He released the documents. He is leaving it up to history. I am telling you dude, that shit is in the works that is not involving Obama and the attorney general. Plus man, you know the accused is going to have top notch defense teams and more than likely it will be dismissed! So all of this could be for nothing. I'll just say this, don't expect Bush or his minions to go traveling the world because they all have warrants for their arrest or shoes to throw at them.

The petition is at: http://www.democrats.com/no-amnesty-for-torturers?cid=ZGVtczI5MzkzNWRlbXM

Powell: I Don’t Know Whether Torture ‘Would Be Considered Criminal’

Powell: I Don’t Know Whether Torture ‘Would Be Considered Criminal’

Last night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviewed former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Unlike many journalists, Maddow asked him about — and pressed him repeatedly on — his role in approving torture against detainees. Specifically, she asked him about reports that he was among nine White House “principals” who approved torture techniques so specifically that “interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.”



Powell refused to acknowledge his role in these meetings, and claimed ignorance about long-released legal memos that specifically authorized torture. Choosing his words carefully, he would say only that, “at least from the State Department standpoint,” it was important to stand by the Geneva Conventions. Powell also questioned whether tactics like sleep deprivation, stress positions, or waterboarding were “criminal” — despite specific U.S. statutes and international law forbidding torture:

MADDOW: If there was a meeting though at which senior officials were saying, were discussing and giving the approval for sleep deprivation, stress positions, waterboarding. Were those officials committing crimes when they were giving their authorization?

POWELL: You’re asking me a legal question. I mean, I don’t know that any of these items would be considered criminal. And I will wait for whatever investigations that the government or the Congress intends to pursue with this.

Throughout the interview, Powell shirked any responsibility to account for his actions by deferring to hypothetical “investigations” or pointing to the unreleased — and possibly non-existent — “written record” of these meetings as providing the ultimate final word. As Maddow pointed, it’s unclear whether any such investigations will ever take place. Watch it:

Powell has gotten credit in the past for supposedly “breaking” with the Bush administration on the issue of torture. However, his refusal to even acknowledge centuries-long definitions of torture is a discouraging indication that he is more concerned with protecting himself legally than getting to the truth of America’s national disgrace.

Transcript:

RACHEL: On the issue of intelligence, tainted evidence, and those things, were you ever present at meetings at which the interrogation of prisoners, like Abu Zubaydah, other prisoners in those early days, where the interrogation was directed, where specific interrogations were approved? It has been reported on a couple of different sources that there were principals meetings to which you would have typically been there, where interrogations were almost play by play discussed.

POWELL: They were not play-by-play discussed, but there were conversations at senior level as to what could be done with respect to interrogation. I cannot go further because I don’t have knowledge of all the meetings that took place or what was discussed at each of those meetings and I think it’s going to have to be the written record of those meetings that will determine whether anything improper took place.

But it was always the case that, at least from the State Department standpoint, we should be consistent with the requirements of the Geneva Convention and that’s why this was such a controversial, controversial issue. But you’ll have to go — and in due course I think we all will go — to the written record of what memos were signed. I’m not sure what memos were signed or not signed. I didn’t have access to all of that information.

MADDOW: If there was a meeting though at which senior officials were saying, were discussing and giving the approval for sleep deprivation, stress positions, waterboarding. Were those officials committing crimes when they were giving their authorization?

POWELL: You’re asking me a legal question. I mean, I don’t know that any of these items would be considered criminal. And I will wait for whatever investigations that the government or the Congress intends to pursue with this.

MADDOW: There have been two Bush administration officials now who have said explicitly that what we did at Guantanamo was torture. One of them was the State Department general counsel for Guantanamo litigation, a man named, um, Vijay - excuse me – Padmanabhan.

POWELL: I don’t know him.

MADDOW: Also Susan Crawford, who heads up the military tribunals at Guantanamo. Both have said it was torture. Do you think that they are wrong? Do you feel like you have enough information to know if people were waterboarded, is that torture?

POWELL: I will let those who are making the legal determination of that make that judgment. Susan Crawford has made a statement and she is in a position of authority to make such a statement, has access to all the information. The lawyer you mentioned who is working in I guess in the legal advisor’s office in the State Department, but I don’t believe I know him, has made statements recently. What’s the basis for his statements and what meetings he was in and whether he was in Guantanamo I just don’t know.

MADDOW: I guess have to ask that — just a broader question about whether or not you have regrets, not about what the Bush administration did broadly in the years that you were secretary of state but the decisions that you participated in about interrogation, about torture, about the other things that are now so controversial —

POWELL: We had no meeting on torture. It is constantly said that the meetings - I had an issue with this - we had meetings on what torture to administer. What I recall, the meetings I was in, and I was not in all the meetings and I was not a author of many of the memos that have been written and some have come out and some have not come out. The only meetings I recall were where we talked about what is it we can do with respect to trying to get information from individuals who were in our custody. And I will just have to wait until the full written record is available and has been examined.

MADDOW: I don’t mean to press you on this to the point of discomfort, but there is an extent to which there is a legal discussion around this where everybody feels a little constrained by the legal terms and whether or not they are a legal professional. There is also the policy implications that you’ve been so eloquent about, in terms of what the implications are of these policies for the U.S. abroad in a continuing way. And you’ve been very optimistic in thinking that America still has a reservoir of good will around the world that we can call on regardless of these difficulties that we’ve had around these issues.

If specific interrogation techniques were being approved by people at the political level in the Cabinet, it doesn’t — the legal niceties of it almost become less important.

POWELL: I don’t know where these things were being approved at a political level.

MADDOW: If there a principals meeting at the White House to discuss interrogation techniques?

POWELL: It does not mean it was approved, anything was approved at a meeting.

MADDOW: OK.

POWELL: It depends on, did the meeting end up in a conclusion or was it just a briefing that then went to others to make a final decision on and to document. And so it is a legal issue and I think we have to be very careful and I have to be very careful because I don’t want to be seen as implicating anybody or accusing anybody because I don’t have the complete record on this. And that complete record I think in due course

Reporter talks about Iraq with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show

Jon Stewart has an interesting but short interview with US News and World Report writer Alex Kingsbury about Iraq. (actual video at bottom)

Some key points:

Security is better in some areas. US troops are now acting like cops- he mentions US troops looking for a Benzine drug lab.

Stewart points out that it must be hard to the police and not speak the language - Kingsbury agrees pointing out how still after 5 years very few US troops speak any Arabic.

Kingsbury also tells of streams of human feces running down the street, and how still after 5 years the people only have one hour of power a day.

Kingsbury talks about the troops feeling about US patriotism not being about what side of the lapel you wear your flag on but believe patriotism is really about staying informed.

Wished this interview had gone longer.

George Tenent is still at the Center of the Storm

The man of the moment as we end the month of April is George Tenent who recievd 4 million in Advance for his new book Center of the Storm.

I covered the New York Times Book review in the last post. Here are two short videos that cover the reaction to the book (below).

The MUST SEE is Tenents 60 Minute interview which you can see here over at Crooks & Lyers : http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/29/george-tenet-breaks-his-silence/

These other two videos really give such a biased view of this man that when you see him explaining himself it is quiet awakening. He makes his dedication to `his officers' quite plain. He admits mistakes and tries to rationalize what occured from his perspective. He is frighteninglly annimated in this confrontational interview.

How he sees the chain of events.

1. CIA knew about Bin Laden and were activelly trying to attack where he belived Bin Laden was based both during the Clinton Administration and the Bush administration.

2. Bush gave him thge OK to attack Aphganistan. The first US war lead by the CIA- wehich he feels was successful.

3. Bin Laden Escaped.

4> Desperate times called for desperate measures ( why we tortured people)

5. Richard Perle was the first one he heard blame Iraq for 9/11.

6. There was very little debate aboutr attcaking Iraq.

7. Tenent and the CIA knew that Saddamm didnt have nukes and let it be known, and stopped the comment from being used in two Presidential speaches.

8. Tennet did not read (as he should have the President's State of the Union adress- but passed that task down to flunkiew who did not catch the misstatement.

9. The CIA made an educated guess about the Chemical weapons- and they were wrong. Sorry. (Especially to Collin Powell).

10 Joe Wilson wrote his famous editorial about there being no Uranium coming from Africa- and the White House attacked the CIA by outing Wilson's wife Vallery Plame. That was wrong and inexcusable.

11. The bad guys were Condelica Rice and Dick Cheney.

1.. Someone mis-quoted Tenent on the `slam dunk statement" as a set up to Bob Woodward.

13. Bush gave him the meddle of Freedom because of the CIA's work in Afghanistan and not Iraq, and he did question whether or not to take it.

BELOW IS A NEWS VIDEO THAT COVERS THE 60 MINUTE EPISODE - BUT IT IS NOT THE EPISODE)



Keith Olberman interviews Larry Johnson regarding George Tenet's new book, At the Center of the Storm. Covers the White House response to his book. And, interestingly covers Democrat Senator Dick Durben's complicit role as a member of the intelligence committee hiding the truth at the time (because the truth was secret) and then proudly boasting he- who knew more facts than others- voted against the war.

Top aide to Colin Powell :: UN presentation "lowest point in my life"

Former aide: Powell WMD speech 'lowest point in my life'

Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Posted: 10:44 a.m. EDT (14:44 GMT)

(CNN) -- A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life.

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."

Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." The program pieced together the events leading up to the mistaken WMD intelligence that was presented to the public. A presidential commission that investigated the pre-war WMD intelligence found much of it to be "dead wrong."

Powell's speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell's presentation initially came from a document he described as "sort of a Chinese menu" that was provided by the White House.

"(Powell) came through the door ... and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, 'This is what I've got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'" Wilkerson says in the program. "It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose."

Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says.

"There was no way the Secretary of State was going to read off a script about serious matters of intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically un-sourced," Wilkerson says.

In one dramatic accusation in his speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.

"In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator," says David Kay, who served as the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector who had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as "Curveball."

After searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true.

"George actually did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you're telling the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that? It's difficult to maintain any warm feelings."

Powell gives bleak assessment of Iraq

Colin Powell, US secretary of state, says he would like to see US troops leave Iraq “as quickly as possible” but that the insurgency does not allow the Bush administration to set a timeframe for a withdrawal.

He said Mr Rumsfeld, criticised for the conduct of the war, had an interest in hiding the true picture from the president. According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Mr Powell for his view on the progress of the war. “We're losing,” Mr Powell was quoted as saying. Mr Freeman said Mr Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave.


One counterinsurgency expert said Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, had a “brutally accurate” picture of the situation and the potential dangers. But a member of an influential neoconservative policy group, who asked not to be named, said such warnings “stop well short of thepresident”.

He said Mr Rumsfeld, criticised for the conduct of the war, had an interest in hiding the true picture from the president. According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Mr Powell for his view on the progress of the war. “We're losing,” Mr Powell was quoted as saying. Mr Freeman said Mr Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave.

Asked to comment on this account, a senior White House official said he had no knowledge of such an exchange and added: “The president acknowledges there are significant challenges. He does not characterise them as insurmountable. Others do.”

Analysts are concerned that with the departure of Mr Powell and his replacement by Condoleezza Rice, the president's loyal national security adviser, the White House will be further shielded from dissent.


“A president is not well served when he has people in his cabinet who have points of view but are not prepared to argue those points of view forcefully for fear that it might leak or it looks like members of the cabinet are squabbling,” Mr Powell told Fox News.

The White House is stressing the January 30 election is just the start of a process that is scheduled to lead to a national referendum on a constitution by October and another parliamentary election by December.

Mr Powell said there must be Sunni representation in the government to be formed after the elections. This reflects US efforts to persuade the main parties of the Shia majority, who are expected to sweep the polls, to co-opt members of the Sunni minority into the administration and the process of drafting the constitution. US leverage rests upon awareness among the Shia that their government is unlikely to survive a civil war without continued US military support.

Charles Boyd, a former general who had opposed the war, said he was dismayed at the administration's lack of commitment in fighting it.

“Our government is not mobilised for war of this size and complexity. We are acting on a ‘business as usual' format,” he said.

Weapons hunt over

Although the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has ended, the Iraqi Survey Group will continue gathering information to help US forces deal with insurgents in Iraq. Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the search, is expected to issue a final addendum next month to his September report concluding Iraq had no such weapons.

(Click titles to link to any origional articals)