In a blistering editorial published in the Monday edition of the New York Times, the editorial page editors are calling upon the Justice Department to open an investigation into the torture practices committed during the administration of President George W. Bush with an eye towards prosecuting those who “committed torture and other serious crimes,” along with former Vice President Dick Cheney and other major administration officials.
Under a headline reading, “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses,” the board criticizes the administration of current President Barack Obama for failing “to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects,” during the period following the attack on 9/11.
The editorial notes that the American Civil Liberties Union will present a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. on Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.
Saying it is hard to imagine the current administration “having the political courage” to order an investigation, the board calls for a full investigation that will include major figures in the Bush administration, including Cheney, and former CIA director George Tenet.
“…any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos,” the editorial reads. “There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.”
The call for the Justice Department to proceed follows the release of the so-called “Torture Report” released over a week ago.
What’s your take on Spontaneous Combustion, been around a long time, real or not? Doctors Investigate Indian Baby for Spontaneous Combustion
A 3-month-old Indian baby is the center of a medical mystery as doctors are trying to determine if the infant suffered from spontaneous human combustion, according to the New York Times. The infant is being treated at the Kilpauk Medical College Hospital in Chennai, India,…
The GOP has gotten away with terrorism in allowing and orchestrating the events of 911. With such success they have built upon that framework for terrorism so that any opposition or differing points of view are chastised and ridiculed. As each day that passes they become more embolden and suggest the most repugnant ideas that Americans have ever had to experience and ARE are now too timid and afraid to raise their voices of opposition against. The dismantling of our Constitution, via The Patriot Act, because of the excuse of 911 is just one of the many brazen steps that they have taken to gain complete control of our Republic. More and more know the truth, become one of them, by spreading the word with the numbers grow and with each new epiphany we will be that much closer to regaining our Nation, our Country.
An Op-Ed Contributor to the New York Times published yesterday, Sept 10, 2012, this article, The Deafness Before the Storm by Kurt Eichenwald. Mr. Eichenwald shows how the Bush administration ignored the warnings of an imminent al-Qaeda attack! The reason, the al-Qaeda attack was to be the perfect cover for their intention of bringing down the Twin Towers and building 7. Dick Cheney had been put in charge of Norad, the first time that position was ever held by a non-military individual. This is just the tip of the iceberg and I am not going to outline all the volumes of evidence here, but I will ask just a couple of common sense questions. The REAL al-Qaeda terrorists and the other terrorists with their different affiliations, we’ve seen how well they accomplish their goals, in fact, a real terrorist (they are all terrorists, domestic or foreign) set off a bomb in one of the twin towers in 1993, the story is here, the explosives were made with chemical fertilizer, although there was about five floors damaged, the tower did not fall. Then you have the bumbling terrorists with the bombs in the underwear, shoes and the like. This is the type of expertise people from that part of the world possess. They live in caves, antiquated houses, electricity is a luxury, do you really think that these people are capable of orchestrating an elaborate attack such as occurred on the Twin Towers? The second questioned is, how many times can you clap your hands together in ten seconds? The approximate length of time it took the Towers to free fall to the ground. Unless you can clap them together 110 times in ten seconds you can’t prove anything else other than a controlled demolition brought down the towers. It’s the law of physics.
Our, wait, no it’s NOT our government, it’s their government, would have you believe the most preposterous of all claims.
God Bless all the innocents who have died and may the real culprits of this terrible deed, one day, be punished.
America Outspends Every Other Country Worldwide Combined
Here’s what Kristof reports:
• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.
• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?
• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.
• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.
Is Military Spending Untouchable?
These are shocking statistics. And while all the talk in Congress is of budget cuts, and fear over a rising national debt, apparently no one wants to make any changes with the military.
As Kristof points out, the president’s party is irrelevant: President Obama actually asked for about six percent more for the military this year than the amount allocated at the height of the Bush administration.
Meanwhile, 42% Of American Kids Live In Low-Income Homes
All this in a country where, as Care2’s Ann Bibby wrote a few days ago, 42% of American children live in low-income homes, and a fifth of those children live in poverty. And what about unemployment numbers, and the plight of the homeless in this country, a number that keeps rising?
There’s another issue here too: having a strong military is important, but so is diplomacy. And as Kristof also points out, the U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service.
American troops in Afghanistan believe strongly in investing in schools, rather than in bombs. They can see the example of Greg Mortenson, who believes investing in girls’ education yields huge returns and has put his faith, and his life, into building schools for girls in Afghanistan.
As of 2010, Greg Mortenson had established or significantly supported 171 schools in rural and often volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which provide education to over 64,000 children, including 54,000 girls, where few education opportunities existed before.
The Need For Balance
Providing early childhood programs, boosting support for education, and developing our diplomatic tool bag, are just a few examples of how our tax money could be spent more effectively to protect United States citizens than by ploughing so much into military spending.
A strong and safe country needs more much than a powerful military presence.
How Corporate America Is Pushing Us All Off a Cliff …a letter from Michael Moore
Friday, November 19th, 2010
Friends,
When someone talks about pushing you off a cliff, it’s just human nature to be curious about them. Who are these people, you wonder, and why would they want to do such a thing?
That’s what I was thinking when corporate whistleblower Wendell Potterrevealed that, when “Sicko” was being released in 2007, the health insurance industry’s PR firm, APCO Worldwide, discussed their Plan B: “Pushing Michael Moore off a cliff.”
But after looking into it, it turns out, it’s nothing personal! APCO wants to push everyone off a cliff.
APCO was hatched in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter — best known for its years of representing the giant tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris. APCO set up fake “grassroots” organizations around the country to do the bidding of Big Tobacco. All of a sudden, “normal, everyday, in-no-way-employed-by-Philip Morris Americans” were popping up everywhere. And it turned out they were outraged — outraged! — by exactly the things APCO’s clients hated (such as, the government telling tobacco companies what to do). In particular, they were “furious” that regular people had the right to sue big corporations…you know, like Philip Morris. (For details, see the 2000 report “The CALA Files” (PDF) by my friends and colleagues Carl Deal and Joanne Doroshow.)
Right about now you may be wondering: how many Americans get pushed off a cliff by Big Tobacco every year? The answer is 443,000 Americans die every year due to smoking. That’s a big cliff.
With this success under their belts, APCO created “The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.” TASSC, funded partly by Exxon, had a leading role in a planned campaign by the fossil fuel industry to create doubt about global warming. The problem for Big Oil speaking out against global warming, according to the campaign’s own leaked documents, was that the public could see the “vested interest” that oil companies had in opposing environmental laws. APCO’s job was to help conceal those oil company interests.
And boy, have they ever succeeded. Polls now show that, as the world gets hotter, Americans are getting less and less worried about it.
How big is this particular cliff? According to the World Health Organization, climate change contributes — right now — to the deaths of 150,000 people every year. By 2030 it may be double that. And after that…well, the sky is literally the limit! I don’t think it’s crazy to say APCO may rack up even bigger numbers here than they have with tobacco.
With this track record, you can see why, when the health insurance industry wanted to come after “Sicko,” they went straight to APCO. The “worst case,” as their leaked documents say, was that “Sicko evolves into a sustained populist movement.” That simply could not be allowed to happen. Something obviously had to be done.
As Wendell Potter explains, APCO ran their standard playbook, setting up something called “Health Care America.” Health Care America, according to Potter, “was received by mainstream reporters, including the New York Times, as a legitimate organization when it was nothing but a front group set up by APCO Worldwide. It was not anything approaching what it was reporting to be: a ‘grassroots organization.’ It was a sham group.”
Health Care America showed up online in 2007 (the year “Sicko” was released) and disappeared quickly by early 2008. You can still find their website archived here. As you’ll see, their “moderated forum” allowed normal, everyday, in-no-way-employed-by-the-insurance-industry Americans to speak out. For instance, here’s something Nicole felt very strongly about:
“Moore shouldn’t be allowed to call his film a ‘documentary.’ It should be called a political commercial. We need to fix our health care system, but we shouldn’t accept a Hollywood moviemaker’s political views as the starting point.”
Here’s what Wendell Potter revealed about the insurance industry’s media strategy:
“As we would do the media training, we would always have someone refer to him as ‘Hollywood entertainer’ or ‘Hollywood moviemaker Michael Moore.’ They don’t want you to think that it was a documentary that had some truth.”
Thanks for your perspective, “Nicole”!
Now, how big was THAT cliff? A pretty good size — according to a recent study, 45,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance.
And here we are in 2010. A lesser PR firm might be resting on its laurels at this point, content to sit back and watch hundreds of thousands of people continue to be pushed off the various cliffs they’ve built. But not APCO! Right now they’ve taken on their biggest challenge yet: leading a giant, multi-million dollar effort to help Wall Street “earn back the trust of the American people.”
We may never know the size of this particular cliff. But we can be sure it’s gigantic. According to the New York Times, one of the things Wall Street’s recession gave us is “the crippling of the government program that provides life-sustaining antiretroviral drugs to Americans with H.I.V. or AIDS who cannot afford them.” Internationally, organizations fighting AIDS and other diseases are “hugely afraid” of cutbacks in funding.
Of course, there are the 101 ways recessions kill quietly. For instance, children’s hospitals are seeing a sharp 55% rise in the abuse of babies by parents.
And that’s just the previous cliff. If APCO and its Wall Street co-conspirators lull us into turning our backs on them again, we can be sure the next cliff — the next crash — will be much bigger.
Anyway, this is all just a way for me to say to APCO: No hard feelings! My getting mad at you would be like a chicken who’s still happily pecking away getting mad at McDonald’s. Compared to the millions you’ve already turned into McNuggets, you’ve actually treated me much, much BETTER! Spying on my family, planting smears and lies about me, privately badgering movie critics to give the film a poor review, scaring Americans into believing they’d be committing a near-act of treason were they to go to the theater and see my movie — hey, ya done good, health insurance companies of America. And, most important, you stopped the nation from getting true universal health care. Good job!
There’s only one problem — I’m not one of those “liberals” you fund in Congress, the ones who fear your power.
P.S. It seems to me that APCO’s discussion of pushing me off a cliff should legitimately be part of their Wikipedia page. And why not something about their role in Wall Street’s new PR offensive? So I’m asking everyone interested to write something up that meets Wikipedia’s guidelines and help bring the APCO Worldwide entry up to date. Post it somewhere online and send a tweet about it to @mmflint. I’ll award a signed copy of “Sicko” by noon Sunday to the best entry…and then deputize you to post it on Wikipedia for real and make sure APCO’s minions don’t take it down. Just be sure afterward not to walk near any cliffs!
P.P.S. The late, great comedian Bill Hicks had some thoughts about marketing and the .
I remember who sent my son to Iraq and brought him back hurt. I remember who sent my nephew to Iraq and sent him back in a pine box, alone and without respect to show the coffins returning rather than our children safe. I WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER BUSH SAYING BIN LADEN WASN’T IMPORTANT WHEN THEY DIDN’T FIND HIM IRAQ. I REMEMBER 5000 DEAD AMERICANS WHO DIED FOR A LIE AND I REMEMBER WHO MADE THE OUTRAGEOUS MONEY FROM THIS WAR. HALLIBURTON AND FUCKING CHENEY
@StartLoving3 Well said, Start. And Just ’cause a right wing tilted supreme court says corporations are persons, doesn’t make it so. I don’t have the patience to engage these teabaggers. It’s pointless; they just parrot the bullshit they’re fed from Fox. They’re the first to suffer under right wing policies, yet they’re the only ones who seem not to understand the mechanics of their undoing.
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There is no reason to believe that things will be getting any better soon, it would be prudent and wise to make preparations for whatever the future may hold in store. One way to do that is to maintain the items necessary for your survival and your family. Get your necessary survival supplies RIGHT HERE!
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