Déjà Vu All Over Again

Think Progress -- Iraq Déjà Vu: Cheney Pressuring Intel Analysts, Stifling Dissent, Manipulating Intelligence (emphasis original):

Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service reports that Vice President Cheney has been thwarting the release of a long-overdue National Intelligence Estimate on Iran because it doesn’t deliver the casus belli for war:

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

Even the special place in hell that must be awaiting "Dead-Eye" Dick may not be enough to punish him for the damage he has done to this nation.

They're copying the whole Internet

A Story of Surveillance

"I flipped out," he said. "They're copying the whole Internet. There's no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything."

If only our congress critters understood what that meant. It means that the NSA has been monitoring all internet traffic, including HTTP traffic between browsers and servers, email and instant messaging traffic. All of it.

The whole point of the retro-active immunity is not to provide cover for the telcos, it is to prevent any scrutiny into what the administration illegally authorized. This is cover for the administration. they will never be held accountable. Ever.

I cannot imagine what would possess the likes of Sen. Rockefeller to cave on this issue. I can certainly appreciate what would motivate the Republicans; they don't want to be held into account for the lack of congressional oversight for the first 6 years of the criminal enterprise that is the Bush administration.

WTF?

Bush presses Musharraf to hold elections (emphasis mine)

WASHINGTON - President Bush told Pakistan's president on Wednesday that he must hold parliamentary elections and step down as army leader.

"You can't be the president and the head of the military at the same time," Bush said, describing a telephone call with Gen. Pervez Musharraf. "I had a very frank discussion with him."

What about all that "I'm the commander-in-chief" bullshit Bush routinely spews? You'd think that there would be heads exploding from all of the cognitive dissonance emanating from the White House.

War Criminals

The Justice Department’s Culture of Torture (emphasis is that of the original author, not mine):

Note that Alberto Gonzales insisted on the inclusion of an infamous footnote which stated that, notwithstanding the different analysis, it was not overturning the advice given by the Yoo/Bybee torture memorandum. Although Levin grudgingly included this, that was not enough to save his job. Why did the Administration insist on this footnote? Because people had in fact been waterboarded, and this occurred with the authority of some of the senior-most officials of the Administration: Cheney, Addington, Gonzales and Rumsfeld, for instance. Without this, the door would be open for their criminal prosecution. Senior officials of the Administration were manipulating the issuance of opinions in the Justice Department to shield themselves from criminal prosecution.

[...]

There is no serious or competent basis upon which waterboarding can be claimed to be legal. The persistence of these bogus arguments is just more evidence of the deterioration of public discourse. Our habit as a nation has always been to accept anything that our political leadership states as a respectabe contention, even if worthy of criticism. But with the arrival of the Bush Administration this has become an extremely dangerous premise. There is no respectable opinion that can hold waterboarding legal. It is criminal depravity. When we allow its justification as an article of polite conversation, we deal our society and its values a potentially mortal wound.

“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” George Orwell reminded us in “Politics and the English Language.” In the waterboarding debate, Orwell’s warning has found its most literal application.

At what point are the Democrats in congress part of the problem? I'd say right now. It is no secret that the Bush administration has violated the 4th Amendment in spying on Americans without a warrant. They have all but admitted this as a fact, and the facts (what precious few we have been able to glean) speak for themselves. The retro-active immunity for telecoms in the new FISA legislation is really all about the Bush administration trying to cover its own ass for breaking the law.

The administration got Mukasey to do an about face on the subject of torture between his first and second day's testimony during senate hearings on his confirmation as AG. His response to follow-up questions from Sens. Leahy and Spector denouncing waterboarding as torture was designed to provide cover from prosecution of war crimes for those in the administration that have authorized its use. Anyone with half a brain recognizes this. I would have to include those members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who have apparently seen fit to give Mukasey a pass for being oblique on the question as to whether waterboarding is torture or not.

That's just two examples within the past two freaking weeks of demonstrable proof of not only impeachable offences, but offences which could land the most senior members of this criminal administration on the gallows in The Hague, being ignored by some of the most senior Democrats in the House and Senate.

The enablers in congress (Fienstein, Schumer, Rockefeller for caving on the Mukasey nomination and the new FISA legislation, and also Pelosi and Reid for leaving impeachment off the table) have twice given these criminals a pass in just the past two weeks, despite overwhelming evidence that the most senior members of the administration have broken the law. This is no blow job, these are real crimes... crimes against us, crimes against humanity.

When will it end?

Mr. Clusterf***

Bush’s Musharraf Envy (emphasis mine):

Developments in Pakistan since Saturday warrant close attention. I am not a Pakistan expert, though I track the affairs of Central Asia very closely, and Pakistan is a vital peripheral power to my zone of concentration. Moreover, those who are deep into counterterrorism studies know that no country in the world is nearly so much a subject of concern as Pakistan. Let’s rehearse the key facts.

• We don’t have to fret over whether Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal and delivery system. There’s no doubt about it. It does. And it’s been the world’s most tireless agent of nuclear proliferation for twenty years.
• Every few months, the handful of Americans who do not suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder ask: Where is Osama bin Laden, and why has he not been brought to justice? And the answer is: he is lounging comfortably in Pakistan, or somewhere very close to the Pakistani frontier in Afghanistan, surrounded by friends and admirers.
• Where have the Taliban been permitted to regroup, draw fresh recruits and launch attacks on NATO troops, including young Americans, in Afghanistan? In Pakistan, of course. Indeed, the Taliban is often seen as the brainchild of some key players in Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI, who continue to this day to maintain close relations with it.
• Where has Al Qaeda itself been permitted safe harbor, been given facilities to conduct its operations, communicate with its various arms, raise fresh recruits, and plot its strategies of terror and mayhem? In Pakistan, of course.

Pakistan, not Iraq and not Afghanistan, was the key battleground of the war on terror on 9/11 and it has never ceased to hold that position. Yet the U.S. Government never really gave Pakistan the attention it needed. If you had to struggle for one word to describe the official U.S. engagement with Pakistan, no doubt it would be “ignorant.” As in: fundamentally uniformed. As Pakistan becomes a greater and greater risk, there is no point in which U.S. policy towards the world’s only Islamic nuclear power, and the center of a global nuclear proliferation problem, has been so poorly informed.

[...]

As I outlined earlier, however, Condoleezza Rice pushed a new policy for the U.S. on Pakistan—it focused on working to create a government with a broader and potentially more stable basis. Condi Rice’s concept, which actually seems to have first come out of Whitehall, was to arrange a shotgun wedding between Musharraf and Bhutto. And Bhutto, sensing she had the upper hand with Pakistan’s key Atlantic allies, drove a very hard bargain.

[...]

So what went wrong? In my view, Musharraf sensed a fault line in the U.S. between Condoleeza Rice, the author of the arrangement with Bhutto which he found so unappetizing, and his “friend” Dick Cheney. Musharraf gambled that in the end, Cheney and not Rice would be the advisor to whom Bush would turn. And Musharraf was spot on.

[...]

The developments in Pakistan are extremely dangerous. And the posture adopted by Bush points to the usual triumph of dumbed-down cronyism over intelligent analysis. It reflects Bush’s vision for himself and the world, namely, no vision at all.

Is there anyone who has done more to f*** things up both here at home and internationally than Dick Cheney? Seriously.

Papers, please

Dartmouth Coach's Fiancée Faces Deportation Over Visa Flap:

Vinnikova, 21, was arrested for a minor infraction related to her visa paperwork, Wiens and lawyers involved in the case say, and now faces a deportation order that would bar her from returning to the U.S. for 10 years. The scenario is a nightmare for the German couple, who were just settling into Hanover as Wiens begins his coaching career with Dartmouth's athletics department.

[...]

The 21-year-old, who like Wiens is an accomplished squash player and speaks fluent English, has no criminal record and no past immigration violations, according to Arn. The lawyer said it's clear her client was trying to follow the rules in extending her time within the U.S. -- unlike other immigrants who simply overstay their visas without seeking to renew them.

“What this all really boils down to is bad handwriting, and that's going to wreck this girl's life, potentially,” Arn said.

Thanks, Lou Dobbs.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, 1883

I want my country back. All this unwarranted fear of "terrorism" is just that, unwarranted. You are more likely to die in a car accident than be affected by a terrorist attack.

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that's a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It's easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the "tools" they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn't matter—because it doesn't really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.

While it may seem all tin-foil-hatty, I really do fear that the war criminals in the Administration will find an excuse to declare a national emergency on Jan 19, 2009 much the way that their "closest ally in the war on terror" has done this past weekend, with barely a whisper from the State Department, and ho-hum treatment from our asleep-at-the-wheel MSM (as compared to say the rest of the world).

Frankly, the fact that Pakistan, a nuclear power that is also the chosen residence of OBL and his cohorts, is in political turmoil should worry the administration a whole lot more than the prospect that Iran might someday in the distant future develop the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon. Apparently, not. Terrorism is just another bogeyman that the neocons in the Bush administration have exploited to unburden us of our civil liberties in the furtherance of their power-grab.

Oh, and Go, Pats!