Secret Memos giving a specious legal veneer for Bush's Criminal actions
Bush administration destroyed 92 CIA Torture Tapes or more
Will Obama begin legal proceedings ?
"This is factually true, with no hyperbole: Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our "laws" were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution. The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President. Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them. What kind of country lives under secret laws?"
Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com- see below-
Anyway there have been more revelations about the criminal activities of the Bush Administration . Nine secret memos were publicly released which are concrete proof of legal opinions given by lawyers to President Bush to give a veneer of justification for the breaking of various laws and basic rights of American citizens . The powers they gave to president Bush & Co. would not be in fact legal .
The other story is admission by the administration that in fact some 92 CIA torture tapes were destroyed even though this was against the law.As Keith Olberman points out given their track record who knows how many tapes were actually destroyed. In both cases they also show a contempt for the American people over and over again they lied to the American people about the government's activities. It further shows how far they might have been willing to go. As Cenk Uygur points out at least they didn't do anything as crazy as shoot down an American Civilian plane or bomb a large apartment building which according to the specious legal arguments in the memos Bush would have been justify such an action just based on his word or that he had a hunch or God told him there were terrorists in a particular building or on a plane.
Once again with more evidence piling up against Bush and his friends it seems that this should force Obama's hand to do something that is legal action and not just a "Feel Good" reconciliation Commission or what have you. As Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com argues that the Bush regime has been revealed as being Radical Extremists for whom there were no laws or rules or even a sense of human decency.
and would constitute
The Young Turks Cenk Uygur :Outrageous and Illegal Bush Administration Secret Memos March 3, 2009
Keith Olbermann Countdown : Bushed 090302 : Interrogation Tapes Destroyed
Keith Olbermann discusses a recent revelation that 92 CIA interrogation tapes made over a seven year period during the Bush administration have been destroyed.
ABC News: Bush Administration Destroys 92 CIA Torture Tapes 3/02
" Secret Bush Memos Released: Read Them Here! " by Staff, Huffington Post,March 3, 2009 at AlterNet.org.
Memos about warrantless wiretaps and warrantless search and seizures released today.
and:
" What Those Secret Memos Tell Us About the Bush White House " by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly,March 3, 2009 at AlterNet.org.
We continue to learn about how far Bush, Cheney, and their team of "creative" lawyers were willing to push the legal envelope
also see:
" Confirmed: CIA Destroyed 92 Interrogation Tapes " by Liliana Segura, AlterNet March 2, 2009.
The number is 'far higher' than the agency has ever admitted destroying. .
Is Fox News starting to wake up to how radical and extremist the Bush Regime was or is Shep Smith of no real importance in the Conservative Movements scheme of things. Well there many voices out there who tried to speak out but they were seen as partisan or as kooks.Media personalities such as Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Bill Moyers & Jon Stewart among others spoke out . Now Shep Smith of Fox News will he be chastised by the Conservatives for breaking ranks because I thought Fox News and the Conservative movement led by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter etc. were still claiming Bush did nothing wrong and was the best president America ever had.
" Fox News’ Shep Smith: ‘This is America; you do not get to hold people for five years without’ charges. at Think Progress Feb. 27, 2009
Today, a federal grand jury formally charged Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri — the only “enemy combatant” held inside the United States — “with two counts of providing material support to al Qaeda.” This afternoon, Fox News host Shepard Smith briefly veered off the Fox reservation and expressed outrage that al-Marri has been imprisoned for five years without any charges being filed against him...
And I quote at length from Glenn Greenwald at Salon. com who hits on many of the issues involved in how radical and extremist the Bush Regime really was but there were those who tried to point this out five or six years ago but they were ignored designated as kooks or partisan or just nit-picking .
" The Newly Released Secret Laws of the Bush Administration " by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.Com and CommonDreams , March 3, 2009
...One of the central facts that we, collectively, have not yet come to terms with is how extremist and radical were the people running the country for the last eight years. That condition, by itself, made it virtually inevitable that the resulting damage would be severe and fundamental, even irreversible in some sense. It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect.
Yet those who have spent the last several years pointing out how unprecedentedly extremist and radical was our political leadership (and how meek and complicit were our other key institutions) were invariably dismissed as shrill hysterics. As but one of countless highly illustrative examples, here is a November, 2004 David Broder column scoffing at the notion that there was anything radical or unusual taking place in the U.S., dismissively deriding the claim that there was anything resembling an erosion of basic checks and safeguards in the United States:
Bush won, but he will have to work within the system for whatever he gets. Checks and balances are still there. The nation does not face "another dark age," unless you consider politics with all its tradeoffs and bargaining a black art.
That was (and still is) the prevailing attitude among our political and media elites: it was those who were sounding alarm bells about the radicalism and damage of the Bush administration -- not Bush officials themselves -- who were the real radicals and, worst of all, were deeply Unserious.
...The Secret Memos - suspension of Bill of Rights etc. This is the sort of activity which the Republican Party and Rush Limbaugh and others continue to defend. That is when Bush did it . If Obama does anything similar you can betcha these Conservatives will display their righteous indignation claiming its all part of a liberal/socialist plot on the part of Obama. But Bush only acted in the way that he did passing hundreds of secret laws supposedly to protect the American people.
More amazingly still, there is almost certainly a whole slew of other activities that remain concealed, and very well may remain undisclosed for years, as a result of the creepy Orwellian slogans embraced in unison by our political class -- look towards the future, not the past!; only "liberal score-settlers" want an investigation of any of this. That mentality is being aided by a new administration that seems bizarrely desperate to keep concealed the secrets of the old one. As but one example, we know that the Bush administration was engaged in certain surveillance activities aimed at U.S. citizens that were so patently illegal and wrong that even the right-wing fanatics in Bush's own Justice Department (such as John Aschroft) threatened to resign immediately if they didn't cease, yet we still, to this day, don't know what those domestic surveillance activities were.
The most vital point is that all of the documents released yesterday by the Obama DOJ comprise nothing less than a regime of secret laws under which we were governed. Nothing was redacted when those documents yesterday were released because they don't contain any national security secrets. They're nothing more than legal decrees, written by lawyers. They're just laws that were implemented with no acts of Congress, unilaterally by the Executive branch. Yet even the very laws that governed us were kept secret for eight years.
This is factually true, with no hyperbole: Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our "laws" were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution. The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President. Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them. What kind of country lives under secret laws?
...And yet even with all of that, our political elites -- the same people who enabled all of this and cheered it on -- are doing everything possible to ensure that none of it gets examined and that there's no accountability for any of it, even if (or rather: especially if) it involves extreme acts of criminality at the highest levels of government. In fact, the only reason we know about most of it -- such as the CIA's destruction of 92 interrogations videos, at the direction of the White House, despite the direct relevance of that evidence to numerous pending investigations (that's called "obstruction of justice," a felony) -- is because groups like the ACLU (with whom I consult), EFF, the Center for Constitutional Rights and others have been so tenacious about trying to compel its disclosure and combat it. If our political class had its way, even the bits and pieces we've now seen would continue to be hidden in the dark.
Most of the specific individuals who initiated these measures may no longer be in power, but the institutions and the political and media elites who enabled all of it haven't gone anywhere. They're now actively working to keep as much as possible concealed and to insist that nothing should be done about any of it. It should all just be forgotten, blissfully erased from our memories, so that none of those responsible are held accountable in any way and can simply continue doing what they've been doing without disruption. Does that sound like a particularly promising recipe for "ensuring that this never happens again"?
and so it goes,
GORD.
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