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Big bro 43 has put us on the wrong side of justice and history.

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On January 21st, 2009, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, on German television urged the U.S. to pursue former President George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on charges that they authorized torture and other harsh interrogation techniques.

He said "Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation" to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld."

He continued that "Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture which required "all means, particularly penal law" to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.
We have all these documents that are now publicly available that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld against detainees at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

In addition to the U.N. a bipartisan Senate report released last month found that Rumsfeld "bore major responsibility" for abuses committed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other military detention centers. Just last week, a Bush administration official overseeing Gitmo trials said Rumsfeld approved the torture of one particular detainee. Bush himself said last year that he was aware of his advisers' discussions on torture and recently admitted that he personally authorized waterboarding Kalid Sheik Muhammad.

They are as guilty as sin and Obama must act against them! It isn't just a matter of restoring honor and dignity to the US. It is a matter of if he doesn't act he is obstructing justice! George Washington University Constitutional Law professor Jonathan Turley on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann said that big bro 43 has made Obama and the entire US accessories after the fact.

Rove is an experienced fiend and he knows he must create a false premise and have people waste their time on tangential matters in the hope that the main crime can be pushed to the side long enough that it will be forgotten. What big bro 43 tries to do is to say that the CIA agents and military personnel who committed torture while following W's orders are going to be prosecuted for following orders. Turley shredded this hypocrisy saying he had "very little sympathy for the people that committed this torture. I've heard President Obama say we don't want talented people at the CIA looking over their shoulders. Well those talented people in this circumstance would be torturers."

"But in reality nobody thinks that they're going to be prosecuted," Turley continued. "They have something called the estoppel defense where they can say that they were told by people like John Yoo and others that what they did was legal. That does not protect the president and the vice president, and they're the ones and the people just below them who deserve to be investigated and they must be prosecuted if they've committed war crimes or we will shred four treaties and at least four statutes."

"And the problem here is it wouldn't make Obama an apologist it would make him an accessory," Turley argued. "He would be preventing the investigation of war crimes. How could he go from that and say that he's all about the rule of law?"

This Yoo is a vile character. Enough has been said about his being a flunky whose ideas were chosen because big bro 43 wanted to torture detainees because that would augment the GOP's ability to say they were tough on national security while the Democrats wanted to offer counseling to the jihadists.

The article "Bush's Secret Counterterrorism Law Book-and the Demands to Release It" at
click here

describes the clandestine manner in which big bro 43's pack of crooks decided to ignore the laws of the US and world and torture defense detainees under their perverted theory of the "unitary executive" power a claim that Cheney has espoused ever since his days of being Ford's Chief of Staff.

The article states "Said Dick Cheney in one parting television interview touching on aggressive interrogation: "I can't claim perfection "but "I can tell you that we had all the legal authorization we needed to do it, including the sign-off of the Justice Department."
Then-President Bush put it more simply. He told CNN's Larry King, "I got legal
opinions that said whatever we're going to do is legal."
They were talking about legal analyses generated by the Justice Department's
Office of Legal Counsel, a small but powerful corps of lawyers who give
"authoritative legal advice to the executive branch. OLC opinions, or "memos," effectively tell executive agencies, including the military, what they may or may not do as a matter of law. Questionable conduct backed by a favorable OLC memo will almost always pass muster. In other words, OLC memos serve as law in the executive branch."

There always is a problem when a ghoul like Cheney tries to pervert a democracy into a tyranny as the article continues "But Bush and Cheney neglected to mention that many OLC memos assessing their strategies for interrogation, detention, surveillance and prosecution remain secret. With an ardent advocate of government openness -- and critic of Bush policies -- slated to take over the OLC, however, people may soon know more.
Some of the memos are by now well-known, for example the August 2002 memo that narrowed the definition of torture. But many counterterrorism-related OLC
memos, including all those addressing the administration's domestic warrantless
wiretapping program, still haven't been released....
These memos laid the legal foundation to many of Bush's most criticized counterterrorism efforts -- the claims of unilateral executive authority to surveil, detain, and try terrorism suspects, unfettered by Congress or international law. Their disclosure could reveal what move was considered when, why and at whose behest."

Here's the rub-Obama's team is now going to bring these crimes to the light of day.
The article continues "Dawn Johnsen, a liberal constitutional law professor, has been nominated by Obama to take over the OLC. She has publicly ripped the Bush OLC for its secrecy, accusing it of "a terrible abuse of power" by its "practice of making and relying on secret law."

We all love our democracy and hate the idea of defenseless detainees being tortured because of big bro 43's ignorant penchant for making others suffer. The article continues "She decried that the public learned of "extreme" interrogation and secret overseas prisons "only because of government leaks" and "years late." That the Bush administration "continues to withhold other memos," she wrote, demands "outrage."

Today, ACLU attorneys sent Acting Assistant Attorney General, David Barron, a letter asking the DOJ to release the memos...
The Bush administration withheld the memos, its lawyers have said in court
filings, on national security grounds and to protect internal confidentiality."

Now is the time for our democracy to bring the criminals to justice. The article continues "But the presumption should be "transparency," Johnsen said, and exceptions should be construed narrowly. The Bush OLC's secrecy, said Johnsen, had disabled Congress and the courts from checking executive-branch "overreaching or abuses,"for the simple fact that they "do not know what the executive branch is doing."
National security should trump disclosure only in "extreme cases," she told a
Senate Judiciary subcommittee last April, and can be satisfied by limited
redactions of "factual details" or "some delay." She will now have the chance to
decide, with an insider's view of the stakes, whether the Bush administration's
decisions to withhold made sense.
Besides being antidemocratic, some have argued, OLC secrecy is dangerous for
practical reasons: It could permit conduct based on faulty premises. The August
2002 "torture memo" was among a number written around that time that were
"deeply flawed" and "sloppily reasoned," according to Jack Goldsmith, who helmed
Bush's OLC from October 2003 to June 2004 and then wrote a book about it."

Big bro 43 depended on mediocre, psychopathic minions to develop their plots for torture. I wonder if they got satisfaction from inflicting pain?

The article continues "The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the lawyering behind Bush interrogation policies for conduct falling below agency standards. NYU law professor Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics and the discipline of lawyers, has said the interrogation-related OLC memosproduced by Jay Bybee, who headed the OLC for two years until November 2003, and his deputy, John Yoo, "are an abysmal piece of work" and should be found deficient."

It is not clear what Obam will do about this, but there is reason for hope as the article concludes "So far the Obama administration hasn't committed to disclosing the withheld memos, much less pursuing next steps....
Johnsen has said, "Questions of atonement and remedy and prevention" can only be answered with "transparency about the wrong committed" -- with "full disclosure."

That is all we want. We want the truth to see the light of day.

Yoo, just like the reprehensible v.p. Cheney and his flunky, the ultimate figurehead W, just can't keep their mouths shut, even after the U.N. and the US Congress has concluded that there is enough evidence to prosecute them for war crimes now.


The article "Yoo: Bush okayed torture to outwit defense lawyers" at

click here

states "It comes as no surprise that the Bush administration had little love for lawyers. Long before the "Attorneygate" scandal developed around the firing of nine US Attorneys in his second term, former President George W. Bush spent a good amount of the time bashing trial lawyers whenever he had the opportunity.

And it was just recently revealed that Bush appointee Bradley Schlozman, who supervised civil rights and voting rights lawyers from 2003 to 2006, thought his charges were little more than a bunch of "mold spores," "commies" and "crazy libs."

Who cares if big bro 43 just blindly followed Rove, who is implicated in Attorneygate? This country is a land of laws which apply to the greatest as well as the least of us. Big bro appealed to flunkies to torture detainees, which sullied our standing in the world, recruited new terrorists, and was illegal.

The article continues "But now, in a Thursday editorial published by the Wall Street Journal, John Yoo, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, explained that the Bush administration's torture programs, for which he co-authored the legal justifications, were initially designed to outwit crafty defense attorneys.

"The first thing any lawyer will do is tell his clients to shut up," writes Yoo. "The [Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds] or Abu Zubaydahs of the future will respond to no verbal questioning or trickery -- which is precisely why the Bush administration felt compelled to use more coercive measures in the first place."

Yoo neglects to mention, however, that before the Supreme Court stepped in, terror defendants were using military lawyers. Nor does he mention that that judge advocate generals (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force and Marines later "said they expressed their concerns as the policy was being hashed out at the Pentagon in March and April 2003."

Remember how big bro 43 always lied he followed his military leaders? That was just another lies as the article continues "Though their letters to the Defense Department's general counsel are classified, sources familiar with them said the lawyers worried that broadly defined, tough interrogation tactics would not only contravene long-standing military doctrine -- leaving too much room for interpretation by interrogators -- but also would cause public outrage if the tactics became known," Josh White wrote for The Washington Post in 2005.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who chaired the 2005 Armed Services subcommittee hearing, told the top military lawyers then, "If they had listened to you from the outset, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we've dealt with.

Evidently, the Bush administration never did listen to them."

Graham is a reliable GOP ghoul. He was always seen campaigning for mini-me, but even he couldn't stand torturing detainees.

There is no honor among thieves with the big bro 43 crowd because there crimes are so heinous. Why is Yoo laying out all of the crimes so clearly? Maybe he doesn't want to be this GOP crime's Ollie North. The article continues "Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us," continued Yoo. "If terrorists are now to be treated as ordinary criminals, their defense lawyers will insist that the government produce in open court all U.S. intelligence on their client along with the methods used by the CIA and NSA to get it. A defendant's constitutional right to demand the government's files often forces prosecutors to offer plea bargains to spies rather than risk disclosure of intelligence secrets."

In the piece, titled Obama Made a Rash Decision on Gitmo, Yoo also directly states that President Bush ordered waterboarding "three times" after 9/11.


Hers is the pre-9/11 thinkers attack on the Democrats for honoring our international commitments to decency, which is clearly coordinated by Herr Karl's Ministry of Truth.

The article continues "Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001," he opined.

Yoo argues Obama's order banning torture "amounts to requiring -- on penalty of prosecution -- that CIA interrogators be polite," and even parrots a Rove talking point: the claim that Obama's ban of torture somehow "prohibits" good-cop, bad-cop interrogation routines with prisoners.

"The Army Field Manual, for example, prohibits you from using good cop-bad cop in interrogating," Rove said on Fox News' Hannity on Monday.

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America," writes Yoo Thursday."

Yoo has Herr Karl's hypocrisy down pat as he labels Obama a pre-9/11 thinker as
the article continues "It is naïve to say, as Mr. Obama did in his inaugural speech, that we can 'reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,'" opines Yoo. "That high-flying rhetoric means that we must give al-Qaeda -- a hardened enemy committed to our destruction -- the same rights as garden-variety criminals at the cost of losing critical intelligence about real, future threats."

You look at the sources. Hannity spews propaganda on TV's Fox New and the Clear Channel Radio. Wall Street Journal is part of their print resources. This is only attempt to appease the GOP base the tiny minority of top 1% fiends and the apathetic red staters whose lives are so desperately awful that the thought of inflicting pain on others appeals to them.

And Herr Karl might get hauled into Congress to testify about AttorneyGate. Who knows what he might be forced to divulge.

And big bro 43 won't allow the truth to come out without a fight. Does he know he has committed crimes? Is he so psychopathically ill he doesn't realize how reprehensible it was to torture detainees? It doesn't matter why he authorized-only that he did.

The article "Bush Lawyer Directs Rove Not to Talk to Congress" at

http://www.newsweek.com/id/182240

states "Just four days before he left office, President Bush instructed former White House aide Karl Rove to refuse to cooperate with future congressional inquiries into alleged misconduct during his administration."

Big bro 43 surpasses every GOP for his adherence to the "unitary executive" powers as the article continues --To my knowledge, these [letters] are unprecedented," said Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor who specializes in executive-privilege issues. "I'm aware of no sitting president that has tried to give an insurance policy to a former employee in regard to post-administration testimony." Shane likened the letter to Rove as an attempt to give his former aide a 'get-out-of-contempt-free card'."

I did not sign up for this. I love the US of A and because of this it is imperative that Obama investigates and consequentially prosecutes big bro 43. We can't just pretend this didn't happen if we want to remain as the beacon of hope for a despairing world.
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Winston Smith is an ex-Social Worker. I worked in child welfare, and in medical settings and in homeless settings. In the later our facility was geared as a permanent address for people to apply for welfare. Once they received that we could send (more...)
 
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