We still have a whole lot of totally unresolved issues in our country.
Small issues for some, such as torture, invading and destroying other countries, killing hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people, destroying the U.S. and the world economies and so forth.
At the same time, those with a bit more decency, brains and no criminal streaks in their makeup, might consider these issues not to be so small after all. We certainly hope that you belong to the second category.
Along with out friends at BadGalsRadio we have been creating and collecting all kinds of materials on these subjects and placing them on the Neocons on Parade website.
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.
This is the seventh post in a series, posted on conjunction with BadGalsRadioon the subject of accountability of the Bush 43 administration and in support of Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry”. Links to our previous articles are at the bottom.
President Obama needs to tell Attorney General Eric Holder to indict Dick Cheney, right now, for war crimes.
Just look at the statute, Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, Section 2441. It says that someone is guilty of a war crime if he or she commits a “grave breach of common Article 3” of the Geneva Conventions. And then it defines what a grave breach would be.
Supadubya [EXPLICIT LYRICS]
I absolutely suggest you watch this, cause these guys is throwin down hard as war. damn they absolutely must put out a cd when the trial starts. get them the crimes and let em rap it to Holder if nothing else works. he would have no choice but to tap his toe to this truthandlyrical assault on these Phucks. “Go Bwoys”
One such breach is torture, or the conspiracy to commit torture, which Cheney was clearly in on, as when he repeatedly defended waterboarding and talked about the need to go to the “dark side” Here’s the language from the statute: “The act of a person who commits, or conspires to commit, an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation, coercion, or any reason based on discrimination of any kind.”
Why Was This nutcase not already indicted ?
Another grave breach is “cruel or inhuman treatment,” or the conspiracy to inflict such treatment. Again, Cheney was supervising such treatment in the White House, which would qualify as committing this crime. One time, it got so ghoulish that Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the other principals, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
Here’s the language on “cruel or inhuman treatment”: “The act of a person who commits, or conspires or attempts to commit, an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical or mental pain or suffering . . . including serious physical abuse, upon another within his custody or control.”
An additional breach is “mutilation or maiming.” Since some detainees say they no longer have the complete functioning of arms or limbs, Cheney may be on the hook here, too. “The act of a person who intentionally injures, or conspires or attempts to injure, or injures whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons . . . by disfiguring the person or persons by any mutilation thereof or by permanently disabling any member, limb or organ of his body, without any legitimate medical or dental purpose.”
“Intentionally causing serious bodily harm” is yet another grave breach. The statute defines this as: “The act of a person who intentionally causes, or conspires or attempts to cause, serious bodily injury to one or more persons, including lawful combatants, in violation of the law of war.”
For each of these offenses, Cheney could receive life in prison, according to the statute.
That is where he belongs.
And it’s time for Obama to stop pussyfooting around. He should indict, arrest, and prosecute Cheney.
“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” said Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.), in the preface to the Physicians for Human Rights report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives”. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
That question is now firmly on Obama’s desk.
And if he continues to dodge it, he’ll make a sick joke of the pious claim that we are a nation of laws, not men.
What Inquiring Minds Want to Know is, Why Does He Always Get INDICTED, But Never Charged ?
HOUSTON (Reuters) – A grand jury in South Texas indicted U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and former attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday for “organized criminal activity” related to alleged abuse of inmates in private prisons.
The indictment has not been seen by a judge, who could dismiss it.
The grand jury in Willacy County, in the Rio Grande Valley near the U.S.-Mexico border, said Cheney is “profiteering from depriving human beings of their liberty,” according to a copy of the indictment obtained by Reuters.
The indictment cites a “money trail” of Cheney’s ownership in prison-related enterprises including the Vanguard Group, which owns an interest in private prisons in south Texas.
Former attorney general Gonzales used his position to “stop the investigations as to the wrong doings” into assaults in county prisons, the indictment said.
Cheney’s office declined comment. “We have not received any indictments. I can’t comment on something we have not received,” said Cheney’s spokeswoman Megan Mitchell.
The indictment, overseen by county District Attorney Juan Guerra, cites the case of Gregorio De La Rosa, who died on April 26, 2001, inside a private prison in Willacy County.
The grand jury wrote it made its decision “with great sadness,” but said they had no other choice but to indict Cheney and Gonzales “because we love our country.”
Texas is the home state of U.S. President George W. Bush.
Bush and his Republican administration, which first took office in January 2001, leave the White House on January 20 after the November presidential elections won by Democrat Barack Obama. Gonzales was attorney general from 2005 to 2007.
(Reporting by Chris Baltimore and JoAnne Allen, Editing by Frances Kerry)
Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
Countdown:The Nation’s Washington editor Chris Hayes points out the missing pieces in Dick Cheney’s defense of torture at Guantánamo Bay.
Doug Ireland: New anti-condom CDC regs give the lie to Bush’s election-year rhetoric.
At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton–the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President–in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.
One of France’s best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke–who came to fame by unearthing major French campaign finance scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of indictments–has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation.
According to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret “retrocommissions” paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery’s construction. These reports say van Ruymbeke has fingered as the bagman in the operation a 55-year-old London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, who has worked for Halliburton for some thirty years. It was Tesler who was paid the $180 million as a “commercial consultant” through a Gibraltar-based front company he set up called TriStar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria deal by Halliburton and Technip and registered in Madeira, the Portuguese offshore island where taxes don’t apply. According to Agence France-Presse, a former top Technip official, Georges Krammer, has testified that the Madeira-based consortium was a “slush fund” controlled by Halliburton–through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root–and Technip. Krammer, who is cooperating with the investigation, also swore that Tesler was imposed as the intermediary by Halliburton over the objections of Technip.
Tesler is a curious fellow: A veteran operator in Nigeria, he was the financial adviser to the late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha and controlled his personal fortune, while at the same time working for Halliburton. Abacha’s former Oil Minister, Dan Etete–who is suspected of having used some of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy–was deposed by Judge van Ruymbeke in December. According to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper), Etete’s testimony seemed to confirm the judge’s suspicions that Tesler laundered the $180 million through offshore and other accounts, and that part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha’s coffers. Tesler’s bank accounts in Monaco, Switzerland and elsewhere have been subpoenaed in an effort to find out where the money went.
Judge van Ruymbeke’s authority for his transnational investigation comes from a law France passed in 2000 against “bribing foreign officials,” following its ratification of a convention adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prohibiting bribe-giving in the course of commercial transactions. The notion that the judge’s targeting of Cheney might be in part retaliatory for the Bush Administration’s exclusion of France from Iraq reconstruction contracts is unlikely: Van Ruymbeke is notoriously independent, and his previous investigations have been aimed at politicians and parties of both right and left. He’s also no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics, having previously investigated bribe-giving by the French petrogiant Elf–indeed, it was in the course of his Elf investigation that van Ruymbeke stumbled upon the Nigerian deal.
The suspected bribe money was mostly ladled out between 1995 and 2000, when Cheney was Halliburton’s CEO. The Journal du Dimanche reported on December 21 that “it is probable that some of the ‘retrocommissions’ found their way back to the United States” and asked, did this money go “to Halliburton’s officials? To officials of the Republican Party?” These questions have so far gone unasked by America’s media, which have completely ignored the explosive Le Figaro headline revealing the targeting of Cheney. It will be interesting to see if the US press looks seriously into this ticking time-bomb of a scandal before the November elections.
About Doug Ireland – Doug Ireland, a longtime Nation contributor who lived in France for a decade, can be reached through his blog, Direland.
(end of clipped article)
I just want to know Mr. Holder, when can I see this picture on MY Front Page. Make it soon, as he’s always pretending to be one step from the grave; but if that’s the case, why not grant his wish and make him the first case of Legally Assisted Suicide. we have an expert here by the name of Dr Kevorkian who’d probably if given advance clemency and proof of no further prosecution; offer to assist DICK in Getting the Phuck Outta Here.
Mr. Holder, grant our Mothers Day Wish, Indict Bush Co. Soon.
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We still have a whole lot of totally unresolved issues in our country.
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.
