Wednesday, December 14, 2005

JFK: Bushit Kills both Kennedys


NOW THE PAINFUL FACTS ARE IN.

THE DARK FORCES OF GLOBAL GOVERNMENT ARE FUNDING, TRAINING AND PROTECTING TERRORIST NETWORKS WORLDWIDE.


If you really want to know the truth,
the whole truth, nothing but the truth:
then view this video: *Over one hour*
ALSO! Video: Disturbing “stabilized” version of the Zapruder JFK assassination film.


Continue Factual Research:

The Evil Doers
OVERVIEW
INFO WARS

HARRP: Cold-war device used to cause Katrina?

Media Campaign

John Conyers.com

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The three levels of control:
Authority
Knowledge
Money
Congress giving BUSHIT WAR MONGERS 50 billion, and 100 billion next yr

New The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: How the Spying Story Will Unfold (and Fade)
The third button on the Daou Report's navigation bar links to the U.S. Constitution,
a Constitution many Americans believe is on life support - if not already dead.

The cause of its demise is the corrosive interplay between the Bush administration, a bevy of blind apologists, a politically apathetic public, a well-oiled rightwing message machine, lapdog reporters, and a disorganized opposition. The domestic spying case perfectly illuminates the workings of that system. And the unfolding of this story augurs poorly for those who expect it to yield different results from other administration scandals.

Here's why: the dynamic of a typical Bush scandal follows familiar contours...

1. POTUS circumvents the law - an impeachable offense.

2. The story breaks (in this case after having been concealed by a news organization until well after Election 2004).

3. The Bush crew floats a number of pushback strategies, settling on one that becomes the mantra of virtually every Republican surrogate. These Republicans face down poorly prepped Dem surrogates and shred them on cable news shows.

4. Rightwing attack dogs on talk radio, blogs, cable nets, and conservative editorial pages maul Bush's critics as traitors for questioning the CIC.

5. The Republican leadership plays defense for Bush, no matter how flagrant the Bush over-reach, no matter how damaging the administration's actions to America's reputation and to the Constitution. A few 'mavericks' like Hagel or Specter risk the inevitable rightwing backlash and meekly suggest that the president should obey the law. John McCain, always the Bush apologist when it really comes down to it, minimizes the scandal.

6. Left-leaning bloggers and online activists go ballistic, expressing their all-too-familiar combination of outrage at Bush and frustration that nothing ever seems to happen with these scandals. Several newspaper editorials echo these sentiments but quickly move on to other issues.

7. A few reliable Dems, Conyers, Boxer, et al, take a stand on principle, giving momentary hope to the progressive grassroots/netroots community. The rest of the Dem leadership is temporarily outraged (adding to that hope), but is chronically incapable of maintaining the sense of high indignation and focus required to reach critical mass and create a wholesale shift in public opinion. For example, just as this mother of all scandals hits Washington, Democrats are still putting out press releases on Iraq, ANWR and a range of other topics, diluting the story and signaling that they have little intention of following through. This allows Bush to use his three favorite weapons: time, America's political apathy, and make-believe 'journalists' who yuck it up with him and ask fluff questions at his frat-boy pressers.

8. Reporters and media outlets obfuscate and equivocate, pretending to ask tough questions but essentially pushing the same narratives they've developed and perfected over the past five years, namely, some variation of "Bush firm, Dems soft." A range of Bush-protecting tactics are put into play, one being to ask ridiculously misleading questions such as "Should Bush have the right to protect Americans or should he cave in to Democratic political pressure?" All the while, the right assaults the "liberal" media for daring to tell anything resembling the truth.

9. Polls will emerge with 'proof' that half the public agrees that Bush should have the right to "protect Americans against terrorists." Again, the issue will be framed to mask the true nature of the malfeasance. The media will use these polls to create a self-fulfilling loop and convince the public that it isn't that bad after all. The president breaks the law. Life goes on.

10. The story starts blending into a long string of administration scandals, and through skillful use of scandal fatigue, Bush weathers the storm and moves on, further demoralizing his opponents and cementing the press narrative about his 'resolve' and toughness. Congressional hearings might revive the issue momentarily, and bloggers will hammer away at it, but the initial hype is all the Democrat leadership and the media can muster, and anyway, it's never as juicy the second time around...

Rinse and repeat.

It's a battle of attrition that Bush and his team have mastered. Short of a major Dem initiative to alter the cycle, to throw a wrench into the system, to go after the media institutionally, this cycle will continue for the foreseeable future.
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Senate Intelligence Committee
This is where the last stand is taking place.

Even in the current political environment, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are going to be looking at a hard slog. It is going to take additional and ongoing pressure on the Republican committee members in order to obtain the slightest hint of cooperation.

The Republicans who control the agenda on this committee are acting as the final firewall preventing a complete gutting of the Republican party on the war in Iraq, secret prisons run by CheneyCo and torture of captives.

As I have mentioned, there are two Nazgûl on this committee, and Pat Roberts is the committee chairman...
He is the leader of the Nine.

These are the people on this committee who need to get the message that obstruction of justice is just as much as political crime as it is a criminal felony:

Pat Roberts: Nazgûl
http://roberts.senate.gov/e-mail_pat.html
202-224-3514 - fax

Kit Bond: Nazgûl
http://bond.senate.gov/contact/contactme.cfm
No fax

Orrin Hatch
http://hatch.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Offices.Contact
202-224-6331 - fax

John Warner: Nazgûl wannabe, didn't have the balls to vote for torture tho.
http://warner.senate.gov/contact/contactme.cfm
202-224-6295 - fax

Bill Frist: Another wannabe
http://frist.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=AboutSenatorFrist.ContactForm
202-228-1264 - fax

Trent Lott
http://lott.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Email
202-224-2262 - fax

Chuck Hagel
http://hagel.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Offices.Contact
202-224-5213 - fax

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http://gratefuldread.net/
More on Ford: Business, Bigotry, and the Lack of Balls
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Comment: I recently had an epiphany as to why these rabid right fanatics think that torture is some how justified. It is as simple as it is sad. They saw it work on TV and in the movies so it must work in real life. After all if it’s good enough for Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s good enough for us.
Here the thing though, for all you rabid right fanatics, the movies are not real life. When Saddam henchmen engaged in torture it was evil, when American soldiers or the CIA do it is still evil and farming it out other governments does not diminish the evil intent. Further providing support for policies and a government which supports torture is aiding and abetting torture, which is only slightly less evil.

I challenge anyone who supports this Bush policy to tell me how this makes us less evil than Saddam and his henchmen.

*******
NEWS:

Good Guys Gone Wild
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/good-guys-gone-wild_b_12238.html

The more we learn of the Bush administration's pervasive outsourcing of torture, the more sensible it seems as a policy. Evidently, our intelligence people, tainted as they are by the squeamish morality of Western civilization, are just not fully up to the task of getting prisoners to tell us what the administration wants us to hear.

Sure, they tried water boarding and extreme stress positions in Guantanamo, but would U.S. interrogators be willing to pull out fingernails or use electric shock, as was inflicted upon at least a dozen of the 625 Baghdad inmates released Sunday from yet another secret inhuman jail run by our Iraqi surrogates? Not guaranteed, and anyway, some conscious-stricken soldier likely would release photos, as one did at Abu Ghraib, and let the world in on our use of such special methods.

Better to use the services of those less democratic nations where torture is the norm, including some, such as Uzbekistan, that still have useable camps left over from Soviet-era torturers. That must be behind the logic of "extraordinary rendition," as it officially is called, in which it is acknowledged U.S. policy to turn over prisoners our government has captured to other nations deemed more effective in interrogation.

Nor can the deficiency of our own personnel be simply a lack of language skills, religious familiarity, or cultural affinity between interrogator and subject, as apologists for the administration's policy have suggested. Over the last decades, many billions of dollars have been spent in supplying our intelligence agents with precisely that sort of expertise.

What clearly is missing is the will to go all the way in "breaking down" prisoners. There are just too many decent people scattered throughout our military and intelligence forces who would object publicly to barbarism. They, and the American public when informed, would insist on limits, even when the president doesn't.

That must be why the CIA failed in its interrogation of an alleged high-ranking al Qaeda official back in January 2002 to prove the connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Hey, no biggie, they just turned the captive, a Libyan named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, over to Egypt's inquisitors who miraculously transformed him into a virtual spokesman for the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq.

Virtual, because he was shipped back to disappear in the Guantanamo Gulag, but his false witness was trumpeted by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney and the president, who stated on the eve of the congressional vote that authorized the Iraq invasion: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases.'' What Bush did not say was that eight months earlier, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top coordinating agency in such matters, concluded that al-Libi's testimony was totally bogus.

So, one must not jump to the conclusion correctly claimed by most experts on the subject that torture doesn't work just because it yields mostly false results from prisoners who want the torture to stop. In the case of al-Libi, torture worked splendidly to produce exactly the critical false evidence that the president needed to make his case for war.

The beauty of the rendition program is that the administration can still claim to be against torture because the host nation torturers gave us assurance that they abhor the practice. That is a devilishly clever posture, because there isn't a country in the world that admits to practicing torture. But it is one that offered no protection to Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who as CBS reported, was repeatedly tortured after being "rendered" to Syria, before being released without ever being charged with a crime. That should not come as a surprise to the State Department, whose annual Human Rights Report lists Syria high on its torture-nation roster. But yet the president insists, and the facts be damned, that "we do not render to countries that torture."

If so, why continue to block the "Torture Outsourcing Prevention Act" written by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., which would forbid such "renditions" to nations known to practice torture? Because, as Markey put it, "In order to meet its obligations under the Convention Against Torture, this administration has been engaging in a piece of legalistic fiction. It asks the torturing country for 'diplomatic assurances' that the transferred detainee will not be tortured on the theory that a torturing country will keep its word."

The legal loophole for torture is too good a tool to give up, not as a means of catching the bad guys, but rather as needed cover in possible litigation against the self-proclaimed good guys gone wild.

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Was Focus of Patriot Act Debate a Dodge?

# The 'library provision' took center stage, but critics say subpoena-like national security letters, widely used by the FBI, deserve greater scrutiny.

By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — As lawmakers debated the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in recent months, critics of the terrorism-fighting law focused on potential abuses stemming from a section they dubbed the "library provision."

That section, which has been in effect, alarmed civil libertarians because it granted the government broad powers to obtain records about individuals in terrorism investigations — even from libraries, bookstores and other places that might reveal personal habits.

But now, as Congress prepares to vote on extending key parts of the Patriot Act — with what civil libertarians say are few substantive changes to protect the rights of ordinary citizens — some critics of the act are asking whether they miscalculated.

Although focus has been on extending the act, the library provision has turned out to be rarely used by authorities. Instead, the tool of choice for federal agents has been a more obscure measure, a form of administrative subpoena known as a national security letter.

Unlike the library provision, national security letters have been used thousands of times, although that fact has until very recently been virtually lost amid the intense discussions on renewing the controversial law.

The kinds of information the government can obtain through national security letters includes requiring telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce often comprehensive and detailed records about their customers or subscribers.

Some critics of the Patriot Act, which was first approved after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, wonder whether members of Congress and the Bush administration essentially manipulated the debate in part by selectively releasing data about the government's use of various sections of the law. They also wonder whether fuller disclosure could have aided the cause of critics and resonated more with the public.

"The focus on [the library provision] turned out to be a gift for the Justice Department," said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and critic of the Patriot Act. "With so much attention focused over there, we never got the same political pressure to learn about the use of national security letters."

Critics of the act say this is because information about national security letters was under wraps until after the House and Senate had passed their bills, and because the government continues to maintain secrecy about their use.

National security letters have been around since the 1970s, although the Patriot Act made it easier for the FBI to issue them. The Washington Post reported last month that the FBI was issuing 30,000 such letters every year — a hundred-fold increase since before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Justice Department has called that figure "erroneous." Saying the information is classified, officials have declined to reveal what they say are the true numbers, although many legal and national security analysts contend they are substantial.

By contrast, the department has declassified information about the use of the library provision, showing that it had been used a few dozen times at most.

The government contributed to "an information vacuum," said Lisa Graves, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, who has been one of the organization's primary advocates in the Patriot Act debate.

"Based on everything we know now," Graves said, national security letters are "certainly currently more worrisome" and "more problematic for privacy on a grander scale," compared with the better-known library provision.

The Justice Department strongly disputed the suggestion that it was withholding information to affect the outcome of the debate.

"Any substantive dialogue about the use of national security letters should focus on the clearly articulated safeguards included in the bill regarding their use," said department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos.

"A last-minute effort by critics to focus on long-classified numbers is merely an effort to distract from the real issue here, which is: 'Does the bill contain the proper safeguards?' The fair, unequivocal answer is that it does." Last week, congressional negotiators agreed to extend 16 expiring provisions of the law, making all but two permanent, including a provision that permits intelligence agents and prosecutors to share information. The agreement would also extend congressional oversight of the Justice Department by requiring performance reports and audits.

The legislative compromise could still unravel; a bipartisan group of senators has threatened a filibuster, partly out of concern about the growing use of national security letters. Both chambers of Congress are set to vote this week.

President Bush touted the importance of extending the law in his weekly radio address Saturday, calling the law a "strong weapon for going after the terrorists" and one that has "saved American lives."

He also said the legislation had a number of built-in safeguards to protect civil liberties, citing the requirement that terrorism investigators win approval from a federal judge to wiretap phones or search property.

The library provision, known formally as Section 215 of the Patriot Act, broadened the materials that authorities could obtain in terrorism probes — "any tangible thing" could be sought, in the lexicon of the section — and loosened the requirements that officials had to meet to obtain approval from a judge.

That became a rallying point for critics, because the section appeared broad enough to capture library records, permitting the government to pry into people's reading habits.

Although the section has been used a few dozen times, national security letters, by contrast, apparently became a major growth industry for government terrorist hunters after Sept. 11.

Although narrower in scope, the letters are easier for the government to obtain, because they do not require the approval of a judge and can be issued on the authority of an FBI agent. In some cases, officials have apparently used the letters as an alternative to the more closely scrutinized library provision.

The ACLU is representing a man who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, and who is fighting a sweeping national security letter request for information about people who used a specific computer at a branch of one of the libraries.

Some observers said that the emphasis on the library provision was understandable, given the sweeping mandate that it appeared to give federal agents in obtaining records and other information.

"The change … really strikes at the heart of your average civil libertarian," said William Banks, a law professor and national security expert at Syracuse University law school.

"It was harder for the average person, even the average advocacy group, to get a handle on what national security letters accomplished, and the extent to which they might be intrusive."

The compromise bill that Congress will consider next week includes changes that affect businesses that receive national security letters. The legislation would formalize procedures for recipients to challenge the letters, for example, and establish first-time criminal penalties in some cases for disclosing their existence.

Graves of the ACLU said the changes were a step backward, because they included new rules that were stacked against those challenging the letters. "We would be better off without them," she said.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

...awesome documentary....but the point is...?
...how much more proof is needed for the americans to rekon they are being led by a criminal gang since WW2?
will america-ns ever wake up?

hardly I'd say, unless some majic is performed... mr Hir, would u mind? :-P

3:23 PM, December 15, 2005  

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