THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Can you tell me what you think the acceptable time is for being able to do your job? Rice's job for example?

By the way, briefings for all senior members of Bush's staff including Rice started in December as they have for all transition teams for the past fifty years. Most new administrations hit the ground running and are at speed in days not months. The learning curve that Clarke mentioned and you emphasized was of their own making and a clear indication of Rice's failure was the lack of a principals meeting on terrorism until September. Way too late.

Joe(I want a job where I have six to ten months to get my feet wet.)Nation

Damn lie huh..... you are pathetic ..... Go Here to read the damned lie/s. Klik the memo to read them ....... pathetic

McTag wrote:

In your place, Ican, I would not categorise the claim that an American administration invited an attack on its heartland as "funny". I would probably consider it preposterous, unthinkable, impossible. But I'm not you, thank the Lord. I am glad that more evidence of the thing is now coming to light. Consider it carefully.

I apologize! I should have said hysterically funny. That foolish claim was made foolishly for fools and paranoids, all of whom foolishly believed that foolish claim, including the one who first made that claim. That claim is so stupid, "preposterous, unthinkable, impossible," ridiculous, and moronic as to make it definitely, hysterically funny.

One more time: Whether you or we Americans like it or not, our Presidents starting with George Washington--and probably not ending with George Bush--blundered frequently before they succeeded--when they succeeded at all--in their goals of making America a better country.

Torture, American Style
By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 11, 2005


aher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."

In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.

The title of Ms. Mayer's article is "Outsourcing Torture." It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary rendition."

This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?

As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. ... Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts."

Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose brother was a suspected terrorist.

"Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote.

The confession under torture was worthless. Syrian officials reported back to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is now back in Canada.

Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Mr. Arar in a lawsuit against the U.S. I asked her to describe Mr. Arar's physical and emotional state following his release from custody.

She sounded shaken by the memory. "He's not a big guy," she said. "He had lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken. He looked like someone who was kind of dead inside."

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.

There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong.

Tony Blair knows a little about that sort of thing. Just two days ago the British prime minister formally apologized to 11 people who were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for bombings in England by the Irish Republican Army three decades ago.

Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It's wrong. And nothing good can come from it.

I think Ican remembers reading about Clarke's memo. Clark refers to it in his book, he testified about it before the 9-11 Commission, but the text of the memo had not been released before a few days ago at the insistence of the Bush administration. That was one way of trying to move the focus away from Rice. She testified that Clarke had given her this huge, and therefore unwieldy, plan which included a lot of old data. She made it sound like it was all old news and nothing that she had time to trouble over. She goofed.

It is a prejudice of mine, borne out over the past years, that the Bush team tried very hard to ignore anything that the Clinton team offered in regard to Al Queda. They succeeded with the results we have all seen.

Joe(Senator, I just got the job eight months ago.)Nation

It is very hard to come to the realisation that a president and an administration, sworn to defend the republic, did exactly the opposite, just so as to be able to secure a couple of decades more of fuel.
I'm not too surprised in these circumstance that I seem to be in a minority at the moment.

It was just released yesterday.

I think we all want and have wanted to believe in our government, its veracity, and its competence as long as we could hang on to a shred of hope that our suspicions are wrong.

I think Ican remembers reading about Clarke's memo. Clark refers to it in his book, he testified about it before the 9-11 Commission, but the text of the memo had not been released before a few days ago at the insistence of the Bush administration. ...

Quote:

I think we all want and have wanted to believe in our government, its veracity, and its competence as long as we could hang on to a shred of hope that our suspicions are wrong.

I read and read and read re the current administration. George Bush's (and America's) enemies repeat the tired old mantra over and over: Bush lied. He's a cowboy. Etc. Etc. Etc. They can never support the accusations but they keep repeating them just the same. Then something like the current flap gets printed by some media source and the enemies go "Aha!" and simply ignore all the same information that was printed months, years, or decades ago. How do they do that without embarassment?

All the rest are of one voice proclaiming this president to be the most genuine--there isn't a phony bone in his body--the most honest, and the most willing to tell the American people like it is that we have had in a long time. He makes no impromptu decisions that affect others but rather asks for and listens to all points of view before deciding. And his enemies can't stand it.

Joe Nation wrote:

I think Ican remembers reading about Clarke's memo. Clark refers to it in his book, he testified about it before the 9-11 Commission, but the text of the memo had not been released before a few days ago at the insistence of the Bush administration. ...

Yes, I remember yesterday again reading about Clarke's Memo and many other communications to Rice in the 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 6.4
www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm.
You and everyone else can do the same. The memo itself, while just released 2/11/2005, is very well described in the 9/11 Commission's Report formally released 9/20/2004. The implications of the memo are no greater than the implications of the memos description in the Commission's report.

blahblahbullshitblahblahliesandmoreliesblahblah