There’s no question that the present swine flu outbreak could potentially become a very serious pandemic. As a matter of fact scientists admit that in reality they know very little about the H1N1 virus, which is a type A influenza virus that causes mild to severe respiratory symptoms that, if bad enough, can result in death.  The virus is spread easily from person to person.

Some 159 people have died of the disease in Mexico as of this date and about 2,500  are infected. The U.S. reports 65 cases of infection and thanks in part to the ease and speed of air transportation the swine flu has by now reached practically every continent. The researchers are feverishly working to develop a vaccine against the H1N1, but don’t hold your breath. That might take months and in that time the virus could mutate further.

It is not even clear why so many people have died in Mexico, infected by a seemingly identical virus, while the cases in the U.S. appear (so far) to be relatively mild.

The best course of action appears to be avoiding contact with people, washing one’s hands, maybe even wearing a protective mask and hoping that when needed, the antiviral medicines, such as Tamiflu will actually work.

The swine flu is not a joke, but my point is the media frenzy, which has seemingly taken over the airwaves and all the other news outlets by storm. There’s a huge difference between simply reporting the news and passing along medical advice and having practically nothing besides “the latest” on the swine flu “epidemic” to offer your audience.

If you could (you cannot) believe on what they tell you on television, you might start believing that we have a full-fledged emergency on our hands, just like when Bush’s Department of Homeland Security convinced untold millions through television to buy plastic sheeting, duct tape and gas masks. Some TV channels (FOX News certainly comes to mind here) also told us that Saddam was allied with al Qaida, that Iraq held huge stockpiles of WMDs and so forth.

Our recommendation would be to wash your hands often, be careful around people and if you really develop the telling symptoms, head for the hospital – where they have oxygen and antiviral agents.

Don’t panic, don’t necessarily believe in what they tell you in the media, but as we said, the following symptoms might require immediate attention: Cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Possible diarrhea and vomiting, or difficulty breathing. Under these circumstances you probably should see a medical professional or even visit a hospital. These symptoms do not necessarily represent the H1N1 strain of the swine flu, but it might be a good idea to treat it as such initially…just in case.

Technorati Tags: frenzy, media, swine flu

Some of the information contained in this post is partly based on the excellent reporting by Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy Newspapers as well as from democrats.com.

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After the release of the torture memos and thanks to the constant efforts of many individuals and groups we now not only know, but also have tangible proof that the Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Such information would have provided a foundation for one of Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

Dick Cheney and others, who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions and waterboarding, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

Now we also know that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly – Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003.

The former intelligence official said:  “there was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder. Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

Dick Cheney claimed that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

In short: all of the neocon’s efforts to justify the modifications to the U.S. Constitution, the lies leading up to the launching of the war in Iraq, the justification of torture – against both the U.S. and international laws, the diminishing of the American standing in the world, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – mostly civilians, the black prisons, the expenditures of trillions of dollars and the entire “war on terror” enterprise seemed to have failed all across the board. All we have left now is a really bad taste in our collective mouths, a failed economic system and a huge number of troops deployed throughout the world,  fighting a probably impossible to win war. In addition, we still don’t know for sure the details of what really happened before, during and after 9/11.

After all of this, nobody, except Scooter Libby has been convicted of anything as yet.

There is of course hope that these people – who have invariably and blatantly dared to wear the pins with the American flags in their lapels – will be finally brought to justice. The statements of President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the efforts of Senator Patrick Leahy and other members of Congress seem to point in that direction.

Just to remind you of whom we are talking about, here’s a short, albeit incomplete list of some of the most influential neocons:

The neocons, who worked directly for Cheney included Scooter Libby, David Addington, John Hannah, and Cathie Martin.

Those under Rumsfeld included Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Stephen Cambone, William Haynes, John Bolton, and David Wurmser. But there were many more neocons in other key positions, including Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle.

They relied on authorizing memos drafted by lawyers like John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury, and John Rizzo. David Addington directed the work of these lawyers.

The actual torture was directed by CIA Director George Tenet, whose infamous “slam-dunk” remark about Iraq’s WMD’s now has acquired a double meaning: head-slamming and head-dunking.

The White House Iraq Group (WHIG), led by founder Andy Card and chair Karl Rove masterminded the whole “War on Terror” enterprise, including torture and the insane invasion of Iraq. The other key members were: Karen Hughes, James Wilkinson, Mary Matalin, Nick Calio, Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice, and Ari Fleischer. The invisible powers behind the scenes were Henry Kissinger – who met regularly with Cheney – his partner Paul Bremer, who was chosen by the neocons to destroy Iraq, James Baker, weapons contractor Frank Carlucci, and media baron Rupert Murdoch.

They also worked with a powerful neocon network inside the corporate media, among them with Bill Kristol, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Charles Krauthammer, and Fred Barnes, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon (NY Times), the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, and Col. Jack Jacobs (MSNBC).

One pundit who deserves special mention is William Safire of the NY Times, who did more than anyone else to create the myth of the Prague Conspiracy between al Qaida and Iraq, based entirely on the fantasies of Laurie Mylroie, Meyrav Wurmser, Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen.

Of course George Bush was The Decider who had to sign the ultimate authorizations to nullify the Geneva Conventions and thereby legalize war crimes.

Technorati Tags: bush.cia, crimes, failure, iraq, neocons, prosecution, torture, treason, war

What right does this man have to pose in front of the American flag?

We bet that among the crowded field of neocons – some of whom, like Richard Perle have the chutzpah to deny that fact – the name of Douglas Feith might not quite ring a bell.

That’s too bad, as he has not only been referred by General Tommy Franks as either “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet” (according to Franks’ autobiography) or “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth” (according to Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack), but also by some as the “ground zero” of the neocon conspiracy.

The facts are that Douglas Feith is a longtime neoconservative and former lawyer who has promoted militarist security polices in the United States and Israel, served four years in the George W. Bush administration as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. The extremely controversial (and now defunct) Office of Special Plans, considered by many as the origin of bad information leading to the Iraq War, was set up under Feith’s purview. Feith left office in August 2005 amid investigations into allegations that he deliberately skewed intelligence on Iraq to bolster arguments to go to war, which could amount to war crimes. Feith tried to fend off criticism of his record in his book entitled War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of Terrorism, published in April 2008.

Here’s a little video sampling of what Douglas Feith is all about:

And here’s another, this time aired by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the very same place that is employing Condie Rice. Coincidence? We doubt it very much.

At the same time, shame on Georgetown University for offering Feith a two-year teaching stint. Is this the kind of “talent” that we really want to see clouding the minds of our young people?

Listen to Feith’s confused and convoluted attempts at explaining what he has done.

After the attacks of 9/11 Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith insisted that there was an al-Qaida link and promoted the view that all bad Muslims were working together, with Saddam sitting at the center of their imagined spider’s web. That sort of theorizing had a pernicious effect on real analysis and policy-making. Career intelligence and counter terrorism officials were sidelined for doubting the Wolfowitz/Feith line; others were pressured to endorse them.

Faith’s own website – to which we will not even bother to include a link – is a pitiful collection of excuses. The incredibly frequent use of the words “I” and “me” are probably its most salient feature. A total waste of time.

What the end result of these manipulations has been is a matter of record now, but still not one of the perpetrators has been indicted.

Are you listening Attorney General Holder? We hope that your people are taking notes and preparing their briefs. These crimes cannot go unpunished.

See our earlier posts on the subject:

Cheney War Crimes: Just Look at the Statute

There’s More to Dick Cheney Than Even He Realizes, Pt 1

Fun and Games With Georgie, Dick and Condie

Government-Sponsored Torture, a Stain on America’s Honor

Americans Say ‘Dig Up Those Skeletons, Leahy’

Would You Like To Help Prosecute Bush and Chaney ?

Mr Holder, do you care about the Military Rapes sanctioned by Bush Co ?

Torture Fiends Don’t Want to Give Up

Condi’s ‘Reality’

Technorati Tags: Douglas Feith, fake intelligence, Iraq War, neocon, war crimes

Bria’s Own Words has posted this excellent piece on Condi and her version of ” reality”.

It was also re posted and enhanced by BadGalsRadio.

One wonders how an otherwise respected university like Stanford would want to have her on its faculty, after all that has transpired over the last eight years…

You can send her a note of appreciation for all that she has done for the U.S. and the world condi@stanford.edu

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alot of people think that women have no political opinions. well you’re wrong. we have an opinion about most things and politics is no exception.

We Do Not Appreciate Folks thinking of us as Torturers Ms. Rice. just because you are caught between a rock and a hard place by choice, doesn’t mean we condone your actions at all Sista Girl.

Dick Admits he was a chief component in this whole Torture Plot.
Not Nice Dicky Bwoy – “it’s been a remarkably successful tactic..”

if that’s his opinion, then why not give him a lil Water Boarding; and then lets subject him to a lil standing in place against a wall for 1 week, with no sitting down, or sitting at all. wonder if he could make it for 5 mins ? no way..

and Miss Condi, Y’all Know her hands are not clean

to warm you up we want to share this story from the BBC about a Woman in Detroit who’s life was saved by an Underwire Brasierre.  yes an underwire bra.. why – well the news seems to think we’re all boobs. yeah boobs.

NOTTTT

Clutch the pearls forreal girls,

(and no this is not the lifesaving bra – but one we think could do the job)

A US woman had a lucky escape when a burglar’s bullet bounced off the metal underwire in her bra.

Police in the city of Detroit said one of three intruders fired a shot when the woman looked out of her window and saw them raiding the house next door.

The bullet smashed the window and hit her, but instead of causing serious injury – or worse - it was deflected off the wiring in her bra.

The unnamed 57-year-old woman was taken to hospital and released the same day.

“It did slow the bullet down,” said a police spokesman. “She sustained injuries but they’re not life-threatening.”

Teenage gang

The woman, who lives on the west side of Detroit, had seen the youths breaking into the house next door while her neighbour was away.

Police believe one of the gang saw her looking out of the window and fired at her.

The suspects then drove away after the shooting.

Local police Sgt Eren Stephens Bell told the Detroit News: “We need to get some bulletproof vests made from that. It is some strong wire.”

U Better Recognize..

Yes You Betta Recognize cause Ms Bria says Condi ain’t  getting down like that.. butterahhhh,, Sorry Bria Girl, she did it – oh yeahh – She Did it.

first y’all read Bria’s piece and then continue the journey with our retort below her story. of course it’s got the tasty condiliciousness that you can expect from the BadGals.

NOOOOOO, NOT Condi!! Condi does not get down like that!!

Oh hell nawwww (yeah I said it!!), I’m tripping! I knew that Cheney’s heart was dark but I tell you if what I’m hearing and reading is true, then dang Condoleezza Rice is a gangster 4 real!! She seems so quiet (i know what they say about quiet people lol) and unassuming, but the news is saying she’s ok’d the CIA to use waterboarding as a way to torture folks during interrogations! Ohhhh, it’s like that Condi?? I guess they’ve never heard of a friggin paper shredder. According to documents, on July 17th of ‘02, Condi gave the CIA permission to ‘ proceed with “alternative interrogation methods,” including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu.

According to CNN “the same techniques also were used in the interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the first person charged in the United States in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

While Pres. Obama, myself and others believe waterboarding to be a barbaric practice, Dick ‘Black Heart’ Cheney believes the practice is successful. As a matter of fact, Cheney said pouring water down the face and up the nostrils and making Khalid Sheikh Mohammed believe he was drowning was successful because Mohammed provided a ‘wealth of information.’ I assume one of the questions THEY DIDN’T ASK…was where in the hell was Osama Bin Laden?! Read the rest here>>>

check out Bria’s Own Words

And on that note…

Okay now that Bria Has Spoken We Are gonna let another of our Female Friends Defend from her viewpoint – Meet Stop the Press!

This week she has been hot on the whole torture tata. it’s at times like this that we appreciate having the smart women bloggers that we can call on in response to major issues; not just our always boisterous male blogger colleagues.

Check These Apples Out,,

Technorati Tags: bush, Condi, crimes, iraq, lies, reality, Rice, torture, US

We are mirroring this great post from one of our favorite blogs, The News Writer.

We can only add that Senator Patrick Leahy has wowed to investigate the Bush administration detainee interrogation policies if congressional support is lacking for an independent inquiry into the matter and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has questioned the credibility of former Vice President Dick Cheney who has defended the use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists

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Cross-posted at A World of Progress.

All right. Enough. Just fucking enough. It’s bad enough that Darth Cheney and all the airwave bloviators are bitching about Obama releasing four measly little torture memos.

Cheney, mind you. The guy who was always in an undisclosed location when he was vice president, has now been everywhere telling us how unsafe we are because the eVille liberal Obama released those damn memos.

But now Obama’s own director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, says torture may have helped. Of course, we know that because someone who received a memo from Blair leaked it. Here’s the relevant quote:

High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.

I guess it was just plain necessary to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Muhammed 183 times in 30 days. That’s six times a day, people. Six times every day they strapped him down and poured water on his face to make him think he was drowning.

And that’s just an average. What it really means is that if they didn’t exactly stick to the six times a day average, there were days when they did that to him more than six times a day.

But get this. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter — cause we all know how many interrogations speechwriters participate in — justified torturing the detainees by saying — as pointed out at Every Man a Giant — that “we were actually doing the terrorists a favor by torturing them.”

But the memos note that, ‘as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.’ In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that ‘Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable.’ The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. This is the secret to the program’s success.

Know what? That’s fucking crazy talk.

Because it does not matter one iota that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed — or “KSM” as the government prefers to refer to him so they don’t have to openly acknowledge that he’s a human being — was the mastermind behind 9/11.

And it doesn’t matter because torture is wrong, no matter who you are torturing or why. It doesn’t matter if you got any good information. Torture is morally repugnant. It flies in the face of the very idea of decency.

When you torture another living creature, you lose your humanity. It’s gone. It’s why Paul Krugman was right when he said after reading the four released memos that “There is now no way to view the people who ruled us these past 8 years as anything but monsters.”

What did it really get for us? According to Blair, “a deeper understanding of al-Qaeda.” What deeper understanding did we need? Al-Qaeda’s leaders regularly send out messages telling us what they’re about. Did we really need to stick a guy’s head into a box with bugs and tell him they were poisonous to find out that al-Qaeda is a radical fundamentalist group that has no problem using deadly violence to get its way?

Did torturing any of the taxi drivers and farmers who ran afoul of the wrong people and were falsely singled out to the U.S. military as terrorists get us Osama bin Laden? Did waterboarding Abu Zubaydah 83 times the month they waterboarded Muhammed 183 times get us Ayman al-Zawahiri?

Did torture stop the Mumbai attacks? The Madrid train bombings? The London transit bombings?

No. And even if it had done even one of those things, it wouldn’t be worth it. We are not meant to be a nation of savages, and yet, when we torture — when we allow torture — that is what we are. Brutal savages.

And that goes for any Democrat who knew this was going on as well. If a Democratic congressman or woman sat in a “classified” meeting where torture was discussed — no matter what euphemism they used to keep from calling it what it is — then they’re culpable too.

Let’s say this again: Torture is wrong. It demeans not only the tortured but the torturers and anyone associated with them. And it does. not. work. Bryan at Why Now:

The only two groups who really think torture works, are people who enjoy it, and people so frightened that they would spill their guts on the threat of torture, i.e. the same people who fall for the ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine.

What torture did get us is much less safe, much less respect, much more hatred and much more anger. Digby:

Aside from the moral dimension, which should be the most relevant, the premise that the world must believe the United States will stop at nothing is very, very dangerous. It confirms the world’s darkest suspicions about us and validates many of the arguments made by our enemies. I honestly can’t conceive of anything that makes the US less safe than that.

Torture is immoral. Any country that practices it (or even pretends to practice it) much less contrives an entire bureaucratic legal underpinning for it, is then, by definition, immoral. That’s the kind of ‘exceptionalism’ that turns countries into feared pariah states, veritably begging for mistrust among allies and the creation of new enemies. Unless we are prepared to do a lot more torturing, invading and occupying — basically becoming a malevolent superpower holding on primarily by brutal force — we have to repudiate this concept. The more powerful a country is, the more it needs to be seen as operating from a moral, ethical and responsible standpoint — and the less chance it will be seen by others as a threat. Making the world recoil in disgust at their brutality is about the stupidest thing the leaders of an empire could do unless they plan to spend all their time fighting wars and fending off enemies.

A world power of our magnitude and unequaled military might naturally engenders mistrust around the globe, which our government must already go to great lengths to assuage. To add to that already delicate, difficult situation by illegally invading countries and endorsing something as barbaric, crude and indefensible as torture is criminally irresponsible. The United States is made much less safe by these actions and we will all be paying the price for that schoolyard mentality for the rest of our lives.

Far greater empires than ours have been brought low by exactly the kind of juvenile thinking that leads to the belief that unless the world is petrified of a nation’s power to commit violence it will be unsafe. It’s a self-fulilling prophesy.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been all over the map — the operatives who did the torturing won’t be prosecuted, the big guys who ordered it won’t be either. “Time for reflection, notretribution,” or some such shit. Now, the president is “open” to prosecutions of the big guys.

Guess he got an earful from people who voted him into office. Well, good for you, Mr. President, that you’ve at least banned torture. But now it’s time to tell the truth.

The Bush administration authorized and ordered torture. Despite their “memos” declaring torture legal, it wasn’t. It isn’t. And there were plenty questioning what was going on. A report from a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation released Tuesday night, in fact, reveals that just about every time someone — say, CentCom or Army psychiatrists — some new legal opinion would surface answering their concerns.

For eight years, our government did things in our name that were repugnant. They were repulsive, offensive and obscene.

And so were the people who did those things. Just because they stopped short of ripping out fingernails with pliers or cutting out tongues or burning body parts with hot irons doesn’t mean it wasn’t torture.

It was, and it was wrong. And we are all lesser for it.

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See our earlier posts on the subject:

Cheney War Crimes: Just Look at the Statute

There’s More to Dick Cheney Than Even He Realizes, Pt 1

Fun and Games With Georgie, Dick and Condie

Government-Sponsored Torture, a Stain on America’s Honor

Americans Say ‘Dig Up Those Skeletons, Leahy’

Would You Like To Help Prosecute Bush and Chaney ?

Mr Holder, do you care about the Military Rapes sanctioned by Bush Co ?

Technorati Tags: dick cheney, Enhanced Interrogation, investigation, memos, Patrick Leahy, prosecution, torture, waterboarding