Media commentary on the upcoming 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has raised concern that state secrets may be divulged, including details about how the Bush administration used torture to extract evidence about al-Qaeda.
“I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at” is how American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denney LeBoeuf put it, according to The New York Times on Saturday.
Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain “a prisoner of its energy dilemma” as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.
That April 2001 report, “Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century,” was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the US Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world’s second largest oil reserves.
Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” – despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured.
Our spooks stopped Bush from bombing Iran, but can they stop Obama?
In 2007, just as the Bush administration was hyping the alleged “threat” from Iran’s ostensible nuclear ambitions – and facing renewed pressure from the Israel lobby to go after Tehran – the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate that punctured the War Party’s balloon. The NIE, which represents the considered opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, averred that we knew with “high confidence” Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and not restarted it.
Just remember this was all done with an overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic President elected on a promise to usher in “an unprecedented level of openness in Government” and “a new era of openness in our country.” There’s no blaming Republicans for any of this…
Just days after the Nobel Committee in Oslo awarded Barack Obama its coveted peace prize, two of Washington’s most prominent foreign policy hawks launched a new group and ad campaign designed to depict the president as weak and defend the more aggressive policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
The new group, Keep America Safe, was co-founded by neo-conservative heavyweight William Kristol, who also edits The Weekly Standard; and Elisabeth (Liz) Cheney, the outspoken daughter of Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who is believed to harbour political ambitions of her own.
In a recent article, “On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns,” I spelled out my despair and disgust at lawmakers from both parties (their names can be found here, here and here), who, since May, have voted for legislation severely curtailing President Obama’s ability to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba by his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, and who, as a result, have sent just one resounding message to the American people and the wider world: the ghost of Dick Cheney still stalks the corridors of power.
President Obama may be a pragmatist, but he’s now in charge of two fundamentally neoconservative wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are fundamentally “neocon” wars. They were shaped by the neoconservative belief that American military might can replace rogue regimes with Western-style democracies that won’t threaten US security.
Today, these wars are being led by a commander in chief, Barack Obama, whose views on foreign policy amount to a polar opposite of neoconservatism.
The neocons’ grand ambitions are now in the hands of a pragmatist.
“Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
George Orwell’s truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the “rough men” who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres.
Dick Cheney is giving the Republican Party a demonstration of how to fight a popular president. Stake out defensible high ground, do not surrender an inch, then go onto the attack.
The ground on which Cheney has chosen to stand is the most defensible the Republicans have: homeland security. In seven-and-a-half years after 9-11, not one terrorist attack struck our country.
And, unlike Obama’s position, Cheney’s is 100 percent reality based. He was there. He lived through this. He made the decisions to use the harsher techniques on the worst of the enemy who could yield the greatest
intelligence to save American lives.
By reversing himself and refusing to release graphic photos of abused prisoners of war, Barack Obama has stunned liberals.
They feel betrayed and abandoned by a president they put into office. On war and torture, at least, they thought Barack was one of them. He is not. Barack is not into ideology. He is into Barack.
As he showed in 2008, when he threw his white grandmother under the bus and spared his beloved black pastor, the Rev. Wright, then threw Wright under the bus when his toxicity level rose too high, Barack has all the sentimentality of Michael Corleone when it comes to the family business.
After opening the door to a truth commission to investigate torture by the CIA of al-Qaida subjects, and leaving the door open to prosecution of higher-ups, President Obama walked the cat back.
He is now opposed to a truth commission. That means it is dead. He is no longer interested in prosecutions. That means no independent counsel — for now.
Sen. Harry Reid does not want any new “commissions, boards, tribunals, until we find out what the facts are.” Thus, there will be none. The place to find out the facts, says the majority leader, is the intelligence committee of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.
Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.
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