Talk about bending the law to suit your agenda. Pretzel logic and pretzel law.
Ultimately the best legal commentary on this memo may belong to Professor Jay Leno:
Quote:According to the "New York Times" last year White House lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security.
So if that's legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?
They may have the most to answer for but unfortunately they will never be asked to.
How about November 2nd au
I saw Jon Steward speaking at a commencement ceremony the other day. He said he wished that the graduating generation would do better than the previous one. He said, "You can torture prisoners, and have your photo taken while doing it, but if you don't give a thumbs up you will be doing better than we did."
Lyndie England says she was told how to pose - guess what, I believe her. It's just that Bush and the righties want to blame the soldiers.........
Bill
It is far from certain that the American electorate, those few who vote, will correct the error of 2000.
McGentrix wrote:What am I blind to? The fact that the left doesn't like G.W.? Well, color me surprised!! The fact remains, he isn't a liar. He is a politician, and a rather good one at that.
Sorry, should have linked back to here first.
Actually I like it better this way. More impact.
Cycloptichorn
blind as a bat, besides a liar.......... If you get deceived, admit it and out the liar - if you still back them and make excuses - you are a liar!
Mr Stillwater wrote:Quote:"We found the weapons of mass destruction." Bush issued this triumphant remark in late May 2003, while being interviewed by a Polish television reporter. He was referring to two tractor-trailers obtained by U.S. forces in Iraq. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded these vehicles were mobile bio-weapons plants. Yet they had found not a trace of biological agents on either. (And no bio-weapon facility could be scrubbed completely clean.) In subsequent weeks, it turned out that State Department analysts and even DIA engineering experts;as well as outside experts;did not accept the CIA and DIA conclusion, and some of these doubters believed the explanation of Iraqis who claimed the trucks were built to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. Whichever side might be ultimately right about the trailers, this all-important piece of evidence was hotly contested. It was hardly solid enough to support Bush's we-found-them declaration or to justify a war.
So, Bush should not trust reports from experts in their field? He reported what was told to him and his administration by experts.
No lie. Hindsight proves that because inspectors were not allowed to do their jobs, these weapon labs turned into a false positive.
Mr Stillwater wrote:Quote:"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." And, "[Saddam Hussein is] a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda."
These two Bush remarks go hand in hand, even though the first was said on March 17, 2003, two days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, and the other came during a November 7, 2002, press conference. Together they represented his argument for war: Hussein possessed actual weapons of mass destruction and at any moment could hand them to his supposed partners in al Qaeda. That is why Hussein was an immediate threat to the United States and had to be taken out quickly. But neither of these assertions were truthful. There has been much media debate over all this. But the postwar statements of Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, provide the most compelling proof. He has been conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, and he has told reporters that the intelligence on Hussein's WMDs was full of caveats and qualifiers and based mostly on inferential or circumstantial evidence. In other words, it was not no-doubt material. He also has said that prewar intelligence reports did not contain evidence of links between Hussein and al Qaeda. The best information to date indicates that the prewar intelligence did not leave "no doubt" about WMDs and did not support Bush's claim that Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda. Bush's primary reason for war was founded on falsehoods
Neither of these statements have been proven false, much less as proven lies. Saddam had WMD's, he's used WMD's, it is known that not of his WMD's are accounted for. Evidence for the Al Qaeda link is still coming, keep an eye on the news. I believe Cheney just recently made a statement about the Iraq Al Qaeda connection.
I believe Cheney is the biggest liar/crook/asshole of them all!!!!!!!!!!
Nope, take that back - it is confirmed - HE IS!!!!!!!!!!!
Travesty of Justice
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 15, 2004
No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.
For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.
[] We can't tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft's post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise.
First, there's the absence of any major successful prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly significant — that of the "Detroit 3" — appears to be collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. (The lead prosecutor has filed a whistle-blower suit against Mr. Ashcroft, accusing him of botching the case. The Justice Department, in turn, has opened investigations against the prosecutor. Payback? I report; you decide.)
Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere, the anthrax terrorist is laughing. But the Justice Department, you'll be happy to know, is trying to determine whether it can file bioterrorism charges against a Buffalo art professor whose work includes harmless bacteria in petri dishes.
Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to criticism of his performance. His first move is always to withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat.
For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former F.B.I. translator who says that the agency's language division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. In 2002 she gave closed-door Congressional testimony; Senator Charles Grassley described her as "very credible . . . because people within the F.B.I. have corroborated a lot of her story."
But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. Edmonds from providing evidence. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to.
For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up featuring the "dirty bomber" who Mr. Ashcroft said was plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation.
Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an "enemy combatant" with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that "administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention — that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty bomb' — has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court."
But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn't work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo and put it on its Web site.
Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies "serious physical injury, such as organ failure," it's not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn't apply to interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the president's] commander-in-chief authority." In other words, the president is above the law.
The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday — to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I'm sure, purely coincidental
The key word here being "serious" physical injury, such as organ failure.
McG
Quote:Neither of these statements have been proven false, much less as proven lies. Saddam had WMD's, he's used WMD's, it is known that not of his WMD's are accounted for. Evidence for the Al Qaeda link is still coming, keep an eye on the news. I believe Cheney just recently made a statement about the Iraq Al Qaeda connection.
That statement is in the face of all the events of the last year outrageous.
