A few quiet officials at the Department of Justice have refused to handle or condone the torture cases.

   

  The quiet rebellion has emerged in recent months among the approximately 56 attorneys in the appellate section of the Justice Department’s civil division following a court ruling in February that placed the defense of the approximately 130 remaining Guantánamo cases under the responsibility of the appellate lawyers. More than 300 men captured shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 are still being held at Guantánamo over alleged ties to terrorists, although all but a handful have never been formally charged with crimes.

The fist was usurped by the clubs and swords.

Clubs and swords were usurped by the sling.

The sling lost to the bow and arrow.

The bow and arrow lost to gunpowder.

Gunpowder was trumped by TNT.

TNT lost to atomic bombs.

Dumb bombs lost to precision munitions.

Rock glyphs lost out to Sumerian Clay baked inscription.

Baked clay tablets lost to paper.

Paper files are losing to electronic files.

Photoypositing was obliterated by desktop publishing.

The Victrola was replaced by vinyl records.

Vinyl was replaced with 8 tracks.

8 tracks were replaced by cassettes.

Cassettes were replaced by CDs.

Michael O'Hanlon
Senior Fellow
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

Dear Michael,

Despite your impressive 7 day junket to Iraq, you don‘t know one iota more about Iraq than I do. Not one tiny bit. In fact, with as little as I profess to know about Iraq and combat, my pronouncements and predictions about Iraq have been 100% more accurate than yours.

I can honestly say that if I had ridden around in a Pave Hawk with a flak vest and a helmet for a whole week, surrounded by armed mercenaries (who make ten times what a $19K a year Marine makes), and if I had sat next to Colonels and had I been given the carefully choreographed PR tour complete with demonstrations of firepower and wolfing down an MRE or two, and even if the Wall Street Journal had promised me a forum and pretended that I knew something about combat the way they pretended that you know something about combat- even if all that were happening, I still would not lie to the public about the enormously bloody and hopeless clusterfuck that we have turned Iraq  into.

The brutal jails and prisons that US corporations have created in America and the services they render for profit often involves torture and abuse, and people are not just held without any protections, but corporations use the inmates as profit – acting with god like powers over human beings.

Over 1,139 of the listed people were arrested in the USA although none of them were linked in any way to terrorism. Nonetheless were the INS had them held indefinitely without charges in various locations, denied access to legal counsel and families for months. Some of those who finally did manage to secure counsel were transferred from jail to jail, without any notice to their attorneys or their families. In early 2003, Operation Compliance shifted its focus to netting Latin American detainees who likewise had no connection to the September 11 attacks.

This is beyond nightmare. You have heard of death by spreadsheet. Now you’re heard of corporate incarceration with help from the US immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Johnny Conner was pronounced dead at 1820 pm (2320 GMT), eight minutes after he was injected with the lethal concoction...

....Since the 1976 reinstatement, Texas has accounted for more than one-third of the total 1091 executions carried out country-wide. This year, with other states now reticent, it will account for nearly two-thirds.

Now if Mr. Conner were a stem cell, hell Bush’d take off from his vacation and helicopter in to breast feed him, Megachurch priests in tow. But now that he is a criminal and Bush is all churched up you still won’t hear and vaguely Christian themes. Like forgiveness. Or Love. When Republicans are in power, people die. Iraqis. Americans. It doesn’t matter. As long as someone in a blue suit in a conservative church in Texas feels justice is being delivered at the end of some other Christian’s terrible swift sword.

Texas is the shame of the Republic.

Link :http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070823/ts_alt_afp/usjusticeexecution_070823004059

From the George W Bush’s Presidential Advance Manual, made available only by a court deposition.

This is absolutely Chilling. Shocking. Here it is. Absolute proof that your government would deny you’re your First Amendment rights because you are a Democrat or a dissident. They planned step by step far in advance to not allow you, an American citizen, to hold up a sign in front of the President.

Demonstrators

Always be prepared for demonstrators, even if the local organization tells you that there will not be any. It is the responsibility of the Lead Advance to have in place an effective plan for dealing with demonstrators.

And doesn’t this next line say it all. The Republicans feel they have  right to stop you from protesting the President and his handlers feel they have the right to stop your message from ever disturbing him. This is fascism, propaganda, and wholly illegal. It is the right of every American to protest the President. nd the obligation of every President to hear dissent.

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Finer writes a balanced opinion of the literally fly by night pundits who do a five-day choreographed PR tour to Iraq and then come back as experts.

This discussion came to a head with the fraudulent op-ed piece in the WSJ by two long time war supporters: Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon

A dizzying number of dignitaries have passed through Baghdad for high-level briefings. The Hill newspaper reported this month that 76 U.S. senators have traveled to Iraq during the war, 38 in the past 12 months. Most never left the Green Zone or other well-protected enclaves....Since leaving Iraq last year, I've been surprised by the impact these choreographed tours have had on domestic discourse about the war. First come opinion pieces full of bold pronouncements of "what I saw" at the front. Next, the recent returnees appear on late-night cable programs or the Sunday talk .

The discussions about the tortuous twists and turns of why he chose to leave so suddenly is another Rovian red herring. Rove is distracting us from looking at his failures. Even worse, Rove knows that people increasingly are seeing the face of the Republican Party and increasingly they are rejecting it.

The YouTube video of Mr. Rove impersonating a rapper at one of those black-tie correspondents' dinners makes the Washington press corps look even more antediluvian than he is.

Last weekend's Iowa straw poll ... Ryan Sager, writing in The New York Sun, who put it best: "The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he's little more than Jesus Christ's running mate."

Remember how wingnuts convinced everyone that unregulated business is good for America? And how privitization would help us deliver services more efficiently?

A Lexington County businesswoman admitted in court Thursday she bilked U.S. taxpayers for $20.5 million in shipping costs for Pentagon supplies, a crime that also led her twin sister to commit suicide.

Charlene Corley, 46, pleaded guilty to a nine-year fraud that included charging the Pentagon $998,798.38 for shipping two 19-cent bolt washers.

The German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin published a study authored by  G. Steinberg, a Mideast expert (spent more than 7 days there Mr. O Hanlon).

It’s beyond grim.

"Already today, the main priority is to prevent Iraq from breaking apart completely." That is the sober conclusion of a new study released Wednesday in Berlin on the situation in Iraq... the study argues that there is little hope of a centralized power in Iraq and that the country's future depends on walking the fine line between decentralizing power and civil war.

Our Speadin' Democracy Tour is about over.

Taken from a quote by the Director of the Center For National Security. Today's meme is this: In the waning days of the Bush Administration, the stage has already been set to create a police state and perhaps that's why the Republican leadership (I know that sounds contradictory) is leaving. The damage that is being done has been planned and it is already in motion.

Step One. Destroy the Posse Comitatus Act. Use your military on your citizens, particularly your political enemies.

But civil liberties groups quickly condemned the move, which Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a nonprofit activist group, likened to "Big Brother in the sky." "They want to turn these enormous spy capabilities, built to be used against overseas enemies, onto Americans," Martin said. "They are laying the bricks one at a time for a police state."

Kos,

Tomorrow you sit across across from the DLC leader on Meet The Press.

I will be sitting across from my TV.

I have been a member of this community for over three years and have never spoken a word to you, or exchanged an e-mail, and of course I have no idea whether or not you'll ever read this and I have no idea how this will be received.

But Mr. Ford is the exact problem with the Democrats in a nutshell. And I would have paid money just to have the opportunity to say to hear you confront him.I want to hear him repeat his quasi "Centrist" talking points and I want to hear you stick them up his patootie. I want to see a genuine grass roots Dem confront a Move-to-the-Center (Right) poseur.

Sorry for the link-less and short diary. But this is a very proud moment for us.

Think about the taglines US "news" organizations surround themselves with: The Most Trusted Name In News...The Ones To Turn To...On Your Side...

Guess what, increasingly, American feel the exact same way about the mainstream news media that we do here in the blogosphere.

More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.

And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news -- roughly one quarter of all Americans -- were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.

More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don't care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

Here is Hillary Clinton’s we-are-just-like-Republicans moment.

"A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans... such as nurses, teachers and others who need a voice in the halls of government, " she added.

No Hillary, They Do NOT Represent Real Americans.

I work in a company that deals in lobbying. Lobbyists from the entertainment industry, insurance industry and pharmaceutical industries are in our offices all year long.

Senator Clinton,

They

Do

NOT

Represent

Real

Americans.

They

Represent

Real

Corporations.

They

Do

Not

Care

About

Anything

But

Money.

Frank Rich wrotes about Rabbi Korff, a New England Jewish leader who kissed Nixon’s arse as if it were the Queen’s white gloves. He went on record vilifying Democrats for not supporting Vietnam as un-American unpatriotic and unappreciative of a great president.

The difference between Watergate and Iraq is that the Watergate beltway insiders didn’t really believe that Nixon was truth teller. Today’s pundits are stenographers by comparison. Not only that, but most of today’s pundits are poseurs who confuse wearing a helmet with signs of progress and speaking to officials in the Mideast with actual experience.

Join Frank and me and Glen Greenwald today as we watch the early war cheerleaders fight their own battles. You know. The fact that they were actually war cheerleaders.  And what does it mean to love the troops?

It seems to me that Trolls are invading DKos. Like the yellow hoards over the Yalu River, The yellow stripes are here and picking fights

Exhibit A

Well we certainly have had a lot of attention here. I mean with Bill O Reilly crushing us under his mighty falafel; and Stephen Colbert pointing to our url; YearlyKos out drawing the DLC, we certainly are the cat’s meow.

Exhibit B

I have also noticed a definite uptick in daily visits and page views. Now, I do not run the site. So I don’t know for sure. But scroll down and click on sitemeter and it seems like we have about another 100,000 or so visits and page views a day. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Exhibit C

It sure seems like the trolls these days are a different kind than we have been having in the past. More and more the trolls are hot and run talkingpoints shooters. They register, they wait a day, they fail to make a cogent argument- more and more it’s like they cannot follow the threads, or the discussions. Instead this group just shoots their wad in two comments, they get troll rated and put away and then they go away and brag about it on their tiny little hate blogs. I have been lurking over there and they give each other cyber-fives and act like they scored one.

King George the Decider covering his arse.

WASHINGTON — President Bush is expected to claim executive privilege to prevent two more White House aides from testifying before Congress about the firings of federal prosecutors.

... Also subpoenaed was White House political aide J. Scott Jennings. The Justice Department included both men on e-mails about the firings and the administration's response to the congressional investigation.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding has consistently said that top presidential aides present and past are immune from subpoenas and has declared the documents sought off-limits under executive privilege.

The House Judiciary Committee already has approved a contempt citation against two other Bush confidants, chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers. The full House is expected to vote on the citation in the fall, but the Justice Department has said it won't prosecute the two.

 The report found that about 43 percent of Iraq's population endure "absolute poverty," and that more than half "are now without work."

Child malnutrition rates have jumped from 19 percent before the invasion four years ago to 28 percent now, and there are two million internally displaced people, many of whom have no or little access to food rations.

The number of Iraqis "without access to adequate water supplies" is 70 percent, up from 50 percent since 2003.  

Think about the South Vietnamese and the Montangards who fought for us and with us and the hundreds of thousands that we gave a home to.

Compare with the Compassionate Conservatism of  the Bush Administration: Less than 2,000 of the Iraqis who have asked for  asylum have been granted it. Hell, we can’t even house the residents of New Orleans, but we have displaced 4 million Iraqis from their homes and 2.2 million of those are living in refugee camps.