You may recall from my rant last week about how the Minneapolis Star Tribune will not frontpage any bad news concerning Republicans. Well here's something that I guarantee will not make the paper:
Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, U.S.A. has filed a Complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) in The Hague against U.S. citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales (the "Accused") for their criminal policy and practice of "extraordinary rendition" perpetrated upon about 100 human beings. This term is really their euphemism for the enforced disappearance of persons and their consequent torture. This criminal policy and practice by the Accused constitute Crimes against Humanity in violation of the Rome Statute establishing the I.C.C.
The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Nevertheless the Accused have ordered and been responsible for the commission of I.C.C. statutory crimes within the respective territories of many I.C.C. member states, including several in Europe. Consequently, the I.C.C. has jurisdiction to prosecute the Accused for their I.C.C. statutory crimes under Rome Statute article 12(2)(a) that affords the I.C.C. jurisdiction to prosecute for I.C.C. statutory crimes committed in I.C.C. member states.
(Daily Kos)
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is at it again, publicly claiming that investigations into the use of torture are political posturing against him and his administration.
Of the terrorists, alleged and otherwise, cited by the CIA inspector general that Mohammed fingered during his coercive interrogations, only Ohio truck driver Lyman Faris was an actual al Qaeda foot soldier living in the United States who had the serious intention to wreak havoc in America. However, he was not much of a competent terrorist: In 2002 he researched the feasibility of bringing down the Brooklyn Bridge by using a blowtorch, an enterprise akin to demolishing the Empire State Building with a firecracker.
If that was the most threatening plot the United States could discover by waterboarding the most senior al Qaeda member in American custody, it was thin stuff indeed. And when the English journalist David Rose asked FBI director Robert Mueller last year if he was aware of any attacks on America that had been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through "enhanced techniques," Mueller replied: "I don't believe that has been the case."
Historians will likely judge the putative intelligence gains made by abusive interrogation techniques were easily outweighed by the damage they caused to the United States' moral standing.
It's not so much the content of the article that struck me, but rather the application of the "opinion" descriptor. This was one of the most informative pieces I've read on CNN.com in a long while (though I do appreciate the constant updates about Michael Jackson's estate), and really calls into sharp relief the difference between pure opinion pieces and truthful reporting of the facts -- and how those facts are used and misused by public figures.
Good for Mr. Bergen for sticking to Truth, even if the editors at CNN insisted on calling it Opinion.
Did you listen? Did you hear Joe, TwoPutt and me on The Mark Heaney Show? Stop back around next Tuesday for the MP3 if you missed it and want to listen in.
"I don't care what Colin Powell says," Limbaugh responded on the air this afternoon. "This kind of stuff is said about me three times a day ... and Colin Powell is just another liberal."
Limbaugh brought up his earlier claim that Powell's endorsement of Obama was about race. "He's just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country who had the guts to explain [the endorsement]," Limbaugh said. "There can be no other explanation for it."
Perhaps most tellingly, Limbaugh appeared to call on Powell to leave the Republican Party: "What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat."
Ridge, especially given that he is pro-choice, was going to have to find some way to placate the religious right and Pennsylvania's otherwise extremely conservative Republican primary electorate to defeat Toomey. And Ridge, as he told Michael Smerconish, evidently did not want to do that -- he did not want to have to pass a conservative "litmus test", to undergo the ideological gyrations that might be required to beat someone like Toomey. Perhaps this was simply a personal decision. But perhaps also, as Chris Cillizza suggests, Ridge thought the smarter bet was with the camp of the "establishment conservatives", who are urging more moderation and less attention to social issues, and less so with the "movement conservatives", who are calling for just the opposite. One also wonders whether Ridge's decision was influenced by the experience of his friend, John McCain, who bypassed him to pick a Vice Presidential candidate who would placate the base and -- after a few weeks in the sun for Sarah Palin -- wound up paying the price on November 4th.
While it's certainly good for Democratic electora hopes that Cheney, Toomey, Palin, Limbaugh, and the like are still at the helm of the Republican Party, is it really good for America's public discourse?
Dick Cheney made an interesting admission in an ABC News interview, he admitted that he endorsed torture. He admitted that he approved waterboarding prisoners in our custody. He blew the lid and admitted in an off-handed way that our accusations are all true.
After WWII, japanese soldiers were hanged for the same war crime to which Cheney just admitted. Cheney and others from the Bush Administration need to face criminal prosecution for war crimes. From top to bottom, anyone involved in this travesty needs to answer for what they did.
The Minnesota connection to these war crimes is University of St. Thomas Professor of Constitutional Law Robert Delahunty. Delahunty co-authored the infamous torture memo with John Yoo. Then Attorney General John Ashcroft wanted justification for torture and White House lawyers Delahunty and Yoo obliged. They argued that the Geneva Conventions against torture do not apply to prisoners captured during the war on terror.
We must not forget that many people in the White House, DoJ and Pentagon played roles in the crimes comitted at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, at Abu Ghraib, at secret CIA locations and at Guantanamo Bay. I don't want to go after the soldiers who were following orders, but after the people who authorized and pushed the policy.
Courtesy of Talking Points Memo and with a hat-tip to the Big E for taking time out of Independence Day to post on it, here's a shot of Minnesota's Sen. Norm Coleman reciting with slight modifications a myth about the Chinese drilling for oil off our coast:
At the same time, we've got to be producing more...outer continental shelf exploration. The Chinese are able to begin operating nintey miles from our shore by working with the Cubans, American companies need to tap into those resources. I read estimates, estimates of over 80 billion barrels of fuel being available in our reserves in the outer continental shelf...
Now, granted, Sen. Coleman continues on (past the content of the video) to say "it's all hands on deck, renewables..." and that's where it ends. That's a nice, safe, sortakindamoderate position to take -- as long as he's not misleading his constituents in the process.
But mislead he does, and with a thoroughly false myth. New Hampshire's John Sununu (also currently locked in a tough reelection battle) has modified the myth for his own purposes and been caught. Rudy Giuliani repeated it last week on Glenn Beck's show. Vice President Dick Cheney was dinged for passing the myth off as factual just last month, so at least Norm Coleman isn't the highest on the totem pole to do so.
But what is it with Republican elected officials these days repeating repeatedly debunked rumors as fact?
If we were in some kind of time warp to the late 1950s, this might be considered some kind of Red Scare: The Communists are stealing our oil! Instead, it seems like a new market-based approach to political scare tactics: China has long been seen as an ascendant power in world politics and economics, and supposedly shared political ideals between two nominally Communist governments are simply a convenient detail to use when trying to scare voters into thinking that our oil is being stolen out from under the continental shelf.
There was a similar joke put forth a few years back about how the Iraqi people had been unfortunate enough to have their country's borders positioned on top of so much of America's oil supply. But it's probably out of style by now.
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the President's cataclysmic deception about Iran.
There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.
We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole - or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked - at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so - whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.
A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.
Read the rest below the fold, or simply watch the video (quicktime format)
Vice President Harry S. Truman plays the piano as actress Lauren Bacall, perched on the instrument, looks on, at the National Press Club canteen in Washington, Feb. 10, 1945.
After extensively researching the US Constitution this morning before I attacked the crossword puzzle I have discovered that the term Vice President appears in that revered and trusted document and its amendments no less than than twenty four times. In no instance does the term appear near the words "shall be an employee of the executive department," however, the term also does not appear near the words "shall maintain an office in the White House where he will hold secret meetings with the various "Captains of Industry" and where it will be convenient for him, from time to time, to pick up the President by the ears for a good corrective shake."
I guess what we have here is something historians call a "Constitutional Mexican toss up" which will be decided by the courts long after the deaths of the parties involved.
I do believe however, that a cursory study of photograph of the Vice President engaged at his duties above will convince even the most disinclined observer that the Vice President has historically exercised executive functions.
If anyone needs further research on this please wait until later, I still have to deal with that puzzle.
There is an ad currently running on Comedy Central for David Spade's show in which the comic says that Michael Jackson is having a 50 foot robot of himself built which will roam the desert shooting laser beams from it's eyes. He then asks the viewer, "Wouldn't we be more shocked if he didn't?"
Looking around the net this morning and perusing a few of the thousands of "will Bush pardon Scooter?" stories, that ad kept popping into my mind.
I think that Bush will pardon Scooter, I will be shocked if he doesn't, the real question, for me, is when?
You can be sure the question is being discussed in hushed tones in the West Wing this morning, but the hand wringing is audible out here in the heartland.
"Obviously, there'd be a significant political price to pay," said William P. Barr, who as attorney general to President George H.W. Bush remembers the controversy raised by the post-election pardons for several Iran-contra figures in 1992. "I personally am very sympathetic to Scooter Libby. But it would be a tough call to do it at this stage."
