Forget Confederate History Month, April is now ‘Nuclear Nonproliferation Month.’  Wrapping up his administration’s Nuclear Security Summit on Tuesday, President Barack Obama efforts seem to have paid off with all 47 attending delegations reaching an agreement to tighten controls on nuclear materials.

Several nations agreed to dispose of weapons-grade uranium, end plutonium production, tighten port security and other voluntary steps. All participants endorsed Obama’s call to secure vulnerable nuclear materials in four years, and agreed to seek further cooperation even as they stopped short of any enforceable international agreement.

News of the international agreement comes on the heels of a flurry of nuclear nonproliferation activity from the Obama administration.  The most notable accomplishment came last week with the April 8 signing of the START treaty between the U.S. and Russia.  Despite Sarah Palin’s childish assessment of the arms reduction commitment, proper experts have declared the cuts to be ‘modest and real.’

Internationally, these commitments will be viewed as significant, if not historic.  The domestic reaction is another matter.  It remains uncertain whether an international success will register with American voters whose focus, at present, is acutely attuned to internal issues.

The Republicans, for their part, have been predictably dismissive.  Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), quoted in The Washington Post, said, “The summit’s purported accomplishment is a nonbinding communiqué that largely restates current policy and makes no meaningful progress in dealing with nuclear terrorism threats or the ticking clock represented by Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

Kyl is technically correct.  The agreement is voluntary.  Its success or failure will be determined by the ensuing actions of the signatories.  As Obama told the press following the summit’s conclusion, “We are relying on good will.”  Kyl, though, is missing the point, vastly underestimating the Summit’s significance.

Raising (much needed) Awareness is Progress

The significance of Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit can’t be measured by the communiqué, alone.  In the grand scheme of things, simply drawing attention to the inherent threat represented by loose nuclear material makes the president’s efforts worthwhile.

It’s hugely important for the international community to treat the threat with the proper urgency.  The main reason for this is explained in a April 13 post from Peter Grier at The Christian Science Monitor (emphasis added):

…how much loose nuke material is out there? A lot. The nations of the world together have about 1.6 million kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and about 500,000 kilograms of plutonium, according to data compiled by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Security.

Simple division shows the magnitude of the threat this stuff portends. It takes only about 25 kilograms of HEU or eight kilograms of plutonium to make a crude nuclear bomb.

Fissile material is held at hundreds of locations, with varying levels of security…

Worldwide, many of these locations need better security. Would it be difficult for terrorists to break in and get their hands on fissile material? Not difficult enough.

Indeed, recent incidents indicate that securing this material is a problem that can’t be overstated.

“In 2007, for instance,” Grier writes, “a group of eight people broke into South Africa’s Pelindaba nuclear reactor and research center. “  The Pelindaba facility was previously considered a prime example of how the security of nuclear material should be conducted.

Abandoning Belligerence of the Bush Years

Time will tell whether or not the nonbinding agreement lives up to its intentions.  Immediately obvious, however, is the administration’s rejection of the diplomatic belligerence characteristic of the Bush/Cheney years.

The Bush administration’s exercise of nuclear diplomacy amounted to figuratively poking other nations with a stick, actually seeking to expand potential justifications for the use of nuclear weapons.  Further, Bush had no problem turning that stick on his own constituents,  beating fear into the American populace during the run up to the invasion of Iraq.

Perhaps Obama’s critics are nostalgic for Bush’s counterproductive approach.  Personally, I find Obama’s efforts refreshing, and since he’s having to deal with a number of nuclear messes left by his predecessor — Iran’s nuke pursuits and North Korea’s half-assed, yet dangerous, nuclear program, to name a couple — a more pragmatic approach is certainly justified.

Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, put it much more eloquently in his April 13 Politico post:

Obama has now showed two essential strengths. First, he can deliver what he promised in September 2009, when he chaired a special Security Council session. Second, his team understands the difference between approaches that have strategic depth and can move global players into new positions versus those that are vapidly bilateral and uncompelling to either party.

By inspiring international cooperation toward lowering the potential for non-state actors to acquire nuclear material, then, Obama is potentially setting the table for increased cooperation in persuading Iran relent its nuclear ambitions.  The president is further isolating Iran without the rattling of sabers.  Quite the opposite, in fact, and though the prospects for eliminating nuke related threats are far from certain, they’re remarkably better than they were before Obama took office.

Crossposted from Care2.com ~ Originally published 15 April 2010

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Related on PiP: NSArchive ~ ‘Prague Treaty Cuts Are Modest, Real’

                          

It’s now over three weeks since veteran Justice Department (DOJ) lawyer David Margolis dashed the hopes of those seeking accountability for the Bush administration’s torturers, but this is a story of such profound importance that it must not be allowed to slip away.

Margolis decided that an internal report into the conduct of John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, who wrote the notorious memos in August 2002, which attempted to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, was mistaken in concluding that both men were guilty of “professional misconduct,” and should be referred to their bar associations for disciplinary action.

[...]

Read More–> What Torture Is and Why It’s Illegal and Not “Poor Judgment” – truthout.org

                          

[...]

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.

We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn’t want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We’ve tried every other means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush…

Read More–> A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies by: Sam Smith, Harpers, October 2003

                          

On Tuesday, February 10, the British High Court finally releaseda “seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed.” The document is itself a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002.

[snip]

The revelations regarding Mohamed’s torture, which include documentation of the fact the US conducted “continuous sleep deprivation” under threats ofharm, rendition, or being “disappeared,” were criticized by the British court as being “at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities,” and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed’s torture places the implementation of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance…

[snip]

Read the compelling report @ truthout–> The Real Roots of the CIA’s Rendition and Black Sites Program – 17 February 2010

                          

Follow the link below to read more:

via Dawn Johnsen and the GOP Obstruction Game | People For the American Way Blog.

Related on PiP:

Tell the Senate, GOP – Stop Stalling on Dawn Johnsen OLC Confirmation

                          

Perhaps the most important foreign perspective worth considering is that of our enemy:  Al Qaeda.  How is the argument over torture within the U.S. perceived by Osama Bin Ladin ?  More importantly, how does it impact their recruiting capacity?  To a certain extent, we already know the answers.

One extremely informed opinion was published at The Daily Beast last week.  Writing under the pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, a 14 year Air Force interrogator offered his assessment in a April 20 post.  Responding to Christopher Buckley’s and Michael Mukasey’s criticisms of Obama for releasing the previously classified Office of Legal Council torture memos, Alexander wrote:

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse…

In addition to increasing Al Qaeda’s pool of recruits, the torturing of detainees has undoubtedly led counter terrorism officials to waste time and resources chasing invented threats.  Former Middle East CIA field officer, Robert Baer noted in the May 4 print issue of Time that the Bush Administration selected their techniques from a 1957 paper regarding communist efforts during the Korean War:

The Crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can’t be relied on to produce more than false confessions — because people will say anything to make the pain stop.  This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore…

I’d love to know what you think.  If you’re able, set aside the moral and legal implications of the Bush Administration’s treatment of captured enemy combatants.  Then consider the implications of the above informed commentators, Alexander and Baer; respectively, that torturing our prisoners makes it easier for our enemies to recruit, and that waterboading, specifically, is more likely than not to produce false information from a prisoner.  These tactics, then, are quite contradictory to the maintenance of U.S. national security.

(Originally posted at Care2.com, Political Causes Blog 28 April 2009)

                          

Dawn Johnsen, Barack Obama’s nominee to head his administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), is potentially the most qualified candidate ever selected for the position.  Nominated February 11 and approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee March 19, the Indiana University law professor has yet to be considered by the full Senate.  What’s the hold up, you may ask?  It appears that Johnsen is but another among many who has fallen victim to Republican obstructionism and the minority party’s ongoing misuse of the filibuster.

The Republican filibuster threat is only the most immediate cause for delay; forcing Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV) to scramble for the 60 votes necessary for cloture, followed by an up or down vote which would undoubtedly result in Johnsen’s confirmation.  The underlying causes behind GOP opposition to Johnsen stem from two ideological issues; one of which has been blown out of proportion by right-wing activists.  The other, more significant reason for fighting Obama’s OLC nominee is grounded in GOP fear that she, unlike her Bush administration OLC predecessors, may actually follow the law.

Right-wing activist opposition to Johnsen pertains to her past work for NARAL, a pro-choice advocacy organization.  More specifically, their objection pertains to a 1989 brief in which Johnsen’s organization — along with 76 others — argued against states having the right to prohibit abortions at public health institutions.

Johnsen’s critics have zeroed in on two sentences within a footnote, which they employ claiming the OLC nominee equated motherhood with “involuntary servitude.”  It’s an assertion which Politifact declared, March 24, to be “false.”

Of course, right-wing pundits further afield have taken Johnsen’s words and maliciously converted them, as AmericanConservative.org did September 19, placing the Obama nominee as number 41 among 650 unpalatable administration officials as, “Dawn ‘Compared Pregnancy with Slavery’ Johnsen.”  No matter how it’s stated, however, Johnsen’s pro-choice stance is and has always been remarkably mainstream.

“The real reason” for the GOP stance in opposition to Dawn Johnsen was imparted by Scott Horton, March 26, at The Daily Beast:

…Johnsen is committed to overturning the Bush administration’s policies on torture and warrantless surveillance, which would clip the wings of the imperial presidency. Even more menacingly (from their perspective), she is committed to shining a light on some of the darkest skeletons of the Bush years.

If this is correct, then Horton’s assessment lends credence to that of Glenn Greenwald, whose aptly titled post, “Dawn Johnsen’s belief in the rule of law disqualifies her from Senate consideration,” was published May 13 at Salon.com. Within his post, Greenwald emphasized the fact that the Senate’s scrutiny of Johnsen was tragically absent in its confirmation of some previous, ultimately dubious, past nominees:

The Senate that is refusing to confirm Dawn Johnsen is the same Senate that confirmed Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA Director — with overwhelming Democratic support — even after it was revealed that he oversaw Bush’s illegal NSA spying program.  It’s the same Senate that confirmed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General — with substantial Democratic support — even once everyone knew that he had played a key role in Bush’s torture program.  It’s the same Senate that — thanks to Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer — confirmed Michael Mukasey as Attorney General even after he refused to say whether waterboarding was torture and endorsed some of the most extremist presidential powers ever asserted in the U.S.

In other words, their covering their collective butts, and their doing so at the expense of a nation in desperate need of objective legal guidance.

Fortunately, there are those willing to tell their senators to quit stalling.  A good example of this was a September 22 letter from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, written behalf of several organizations, directing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to drop the stall tactics on Obama nominations.

The LCCR letter refers to Johnsen, specifically:

…Professor Johnsen has already served with distinction in the OLC, and is undoubtedly well-qualified for the position. Her nomination was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in March.  The OLC plays a highly important role within the Administration, and the failure to confirm the President’s nominee to lead the office prevents the OLC from providing crucial legal advice on a wide range of issues currently confronting our nation.

I’ll include some additional links below, but if you agree with the sentiment of the above letter, contact your senators and tell them so.  Additionally, consider signing THIS PETITION from NARAL-Pro-Choice America, calling on GOP senators to refrain from filibustering on the basis of any candidate’s pro-choice disposition.

See Also:

“A Legal Advisor Worthy of the Job,” New York Times Editorial Board, 26 March 2009.

Greg Sargent, “Key Dem Senator Likely to Vote Against Top Obama Legal Nominee,” ThePlumLine, 24 April 2009.

Scott Horton, “Are Republicans Blackmailing Obama?” TheDailyBeast, 5 April 2009.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A8IywX1Arw]

                          

Some thoughts below the fold.

Barrionuevo wrote:

The formerly secret memos, published Sunday by the National Security Archive in Washington, show that Brazil and the United States discussed plans to overthrow or destabilize not only Mr. Allende but Fidel Castro of Cuba and others.

Mr. Nixon, at a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 9, 1971, said he was willing to offer Brazil the assistance, monetary or otherwise, it might need to rid South America of leftist governments, the White House memorandum of the meeting shows…

“The full history of intervention in South America in the 1970s cannot be told without Brazil coming clean about a dark past that is not previously acknowledged,” Mr. Kornbluh said.

This reminded me of a post I wrote for Care2.com following the 2009 Summit of the Americas.  There, Barack Obama was approached by Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, and they exchanged a greeting.  The post, “Gingrich Ignores History, Calls Obama – Chavez Encounter a Sign of Weakness,” is my take on the nonsense which erupted from conservative pundits & wannabe (but never will be) Presidents:

Conservatives have really got their shorts in a bunch over the Barack Obama – Hugo Chavez exchange over the weekend at the Summit of the Americas.  Their discomfort is yet another example of Obama’s detractors, digging in their heels, opposing every aspect of the three-month-old presidency; further, this conservative meme is no more rational than any of the others.  Their outrage over a simple greeting between Obama and Chavez is illustrative of a deeper problem within the American ideological divide.

The best example of irrational criticism came from a potential Obama opponent in 2012:  Newt Gingrich.  Satyam Khanna  summed up Gingrich’s position in a April 20, Think Progress post:

The right wing has responded with outrage to Obama’s meeting with Chavez, claiming face-to-face talks with a dictator show that Obama is projecting weakness. On NBC this morning, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama “bows to the Saudi King and is friends with Venezuela” and claimed the President showed “shallowness” in talking with Chavez. Gingrich then claimed that U.S. presidents do not “smile and greet” with Russian leaders…

Khanna goes on to explain why Gingrich, a former history professor, needs to brush up on his history.  The author provides a series of photographs of past US leaders smiling and greeting Russian leaders during the height of the Cold War.  But, Gingrich’s factual error is emblematic of the larger issue:  Americans tend to forget their nation’s history.

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more about “Gingrich: U.S. presidents didn’t “smi…“, posted with vodpod

Not only do we forget our history, many among us are inclined to guild memories of the past, providing them with a veneer of propriety that isn’t always deserved.  The past behavior in question — the contentious relationship between the US and Latin America — is a prime example of our historical ignorance.

Now, before you start with the “anti-American” or “Blame America Firster” accusations, hear me out.  American treatment of its neighbors to the South has been neither all good, nor has it been all bad.  Indeed, much of the most egregious offenses were undertaken with the best of intentions:  the prohibition of Soviet influence in Latin America.  While Americans are justifiably proud of their nation’s efforts in quashing their communist foes during the Cold War, too often we fail to empathize with Latin American populations who were adversely affected by US actions.

Consider that, historically, the US has, sometimes covertly, intervened in Latin American affairs over 50 times.  Regardless of the legitimacy of the interventions, a common result of such actions was American support of repressive right wing dictators for the sake of preventing leftist regimes from coming to power.

Hugo Chavez, whose handshake with Obama has garnered so much conservative ire,  was able to come to power in Venezuela because of that history.  Additionally, American support of a coup attempt to oust the Chavez regime in 2002 has served to strengthen his position in Venezuela.

In a March 2006 post at CommonDreams.org, Medea Benjamin described the consequences of the Bush Administration’s subversive actions in Venezuela, encouraging her readers to imagine if the shoe were on the other foot:

To this day, Bush Administration officials routinely deny their involvement in the coup, in spite of official US documents that prove otherwise. But the truth is widely known in Venezuela, and forms the basis for the antagonism that plagues the US-Venezuela relationship. To be fair, Chávez engages in regular verbal tirades against Bush and Rice which overreach presidential diplomacy. But imagine how the US government would treat a foreign government that had financed domestic groups that participated in a coup against the US government…

Well, what do you think?  How would you react to a foreign coup attempt?  I look forward to your comments, but consider this final question:  If it was a sign of weakness for Obama to interact with the Venezuelan President at a diplomatic summit, what action or actions could Obama have used in order to display strength?  Of course, Gingrich did not offer a suggestion.

Instead he railed against his own President, and did so without any consideration for how the Obama – Chavez encounter may have impacted the perceptions of the Venezuelan people.  Gingrich conveniently forgot that the eight years of Bush’s diplomatic neglect, combined with a long history of intervention in the region, contributed to the Venezuelans being predisposed to relish in Chavez’s anti-American rants.  His neglecting to include such considerations reflects his tacit acknowledgment that, Americans who are predisposed to accept such cynicism are ignorant of their own history. As a former history professor, Newt Gingrich should be ashamed of himself.

                          

…First, I would recommend that anyone who thinks it is a “stretch” to prosecute lawyers who provided legal justifications for torture to read the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan. Specifically, read these portions:

Article 21. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction. 2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. 3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

[...]

Article 4

1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

[...]

Article 7

1. The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.

The US is legally bound to this convention and I would argue that the attempted legalizing and authorizing of torture, such as was done by Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury is exactly what this treaty addresses and bans…

read more | digg story

                          

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The first month of the Obama administration has been a whirlwind. The president signed the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act–the most comprehensive (and most expensive) legislation in American history–into law on Tuesday in Denver. The following day, Obama began to implement the economic recovery package, no doubt continuing the frenetic pace established since his inauguration. Congress, however, will likely set about getting some answers out of the Bush administration.

That the Congress and the President will be traveling separate paths is inconsequential and should be expected. As Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com perceptively posted on Sunday, the liberal, or progressive, electorate is by no means a homogeneous bunch. He describes progressives as being divided into “rational” and “radical” contingents with countless individual members falling somewhere between the two.

read more | digg story

                          

From The Raw Story, 10 December 2008 post, by Muriel Kane:

…Working from government investigations, news stories, and suggestions from experts and government employees, the team compiled a list of 250 failures, which it then narrowed down to just 128 “that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans.”

The results of the investigation, which are summarized at CPI’s PaperTrail blog and presented in full at its Broken Government project, are stunning in their scope even for those who have been following the scandals of the last eight years.

According to the CPI, “Some of these problems were in place well before George W. Bush’s inauguration, but were exacerbated by his policies or worsened by his administration’s actions (or inactions). Many of the failings are tied to Bush appointees who appear to have been selected primarily on the basis of ideology and loyalty, rather than competence.”…

read more | digg story

                          

“There has not been such an authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers,” Woodward’s longtime editor, Alice Mayhew, said Tuesday in a statement. “This is the declassification of what went on in secret, behind the scenes…”

According to Simon & Schuster, Woodward’s book “takes readers deep inside the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq.

“Based on extensive interviews with participants, contemporaneous notes and secret documents, the book traces the internal debates, tensions and critical turning points in the Iraq War during an extraordinary two-year period.”

read more | digg story

                          

The below video is from Colbert’s Wednesday, August 13, broadcast, and it brings us an update on a previous post regarding an internal Department of Justice report detailing the illegal activity within the department, under the Bush Administration.
Earlier this week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey declared that he or the DOJ would not pursue the matters outlined within the above mentioned report.  Mukasey reasoned, “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws.”

This from the highest ranking legal officer in America.  Again, if we couldn’t laugh we would have to cry.  View the clip & have a laugh.

                          

In this case The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist has illuminated an effort by the Bush administration to falsify a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Husein’s Iraq.  As bad as that sounds, the details of the way they went about it make it so much worse. From the August 6, 2008, Washington Post:

The book’s most contentious claims involve Tahir Jalil Habbush, the former head of intelligence in Saddam Hussein’s government in the years before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. As the deadline for war neared, U.S. and British intelligence officials arranged a series of secret meetings with Habbush in early 2003 and confronted him regarding their concerns about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction …

…Habbush said Saddam Hussein had ended Iraq’s nuclear weapons work after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, and halted biological weapons research in 1996.

Habbush’s accounts were shared with top officials at the CIA and the White House, where they were dismissed as Iraqi deception. In subsequent meetings, Suskind writes, intelligence officials prodded Habbush for proof that the weapons programs had been abandoned.

“Ultimately, Habbush could not offer proof that weapons that didn’t exist, didn’t exist,” Suskind wrote.

After the invasion, Habbush was paid $5 million by the CIA for serving as an informant and resettled in Jordan. It was then, according to Suskind’s account, that White House officials decided to enlist his help with the alleged forgery — one suggesting a link between Saddam Hussein’s government and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attack…

Suskind states that, in September 2003, the White House directed then-CIA Director George J. Tenet to concoct a fake letter, backdated to July 2001 but bearing Habbush’s signature, claiming that Atta had been trained in Iraq for his mission. Habbush agreed to sign the letter, which was then leaked to a British journalist in December 2003, Suskind writes in the book.

According to Suskind his sources on the matter are now feeling the heat to alter or retract their accounts as laid out in The Way of the World.  Below is a video of Ron Suskind discussing the implications of his book with Countdown’s Keith Olbermann from Tuesday, August 5, 2008. For an objective review of Suskind’s book, read Louis Bayard’s review at Salon.com.
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Oliver’s remarks were in response to John Ashcroft’s testimony before Congress. When the former Attorney General was asked about his recollection of discussions regarding the treatment of “enemy combatants,” Ashcroft claimed he couldn’t differentiate his own memories of events with the accounts of others.

The exchange between Stewart and Oliver is below, and lasts 3:25.  For information that is less satirical, see:

From the New York Times:  Two Testify on Memo Spelling Out Interrogation, 27 June 2008.

or this from the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy: Former AG John Ashcroft Before House Committee On Interrogation, 18 July 2008.

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From latimes.com, July 10, 2008:

The measure was in response to an uproar over e-mails found missing by recent Capitol Hill probes of Bush aides, including Rove, then the president’s chief political strategist. Investigators have tried to determine whether Rove and others used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct government business in an attempt to circumvent the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law designed to preserve White House records.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has said that White House e-mails transmitted over several hundred days between 2003 and 2005 also are unaccounted for, an assertion that the administration disputes.

“Some have said that this bill is about preserving history, and it is,” said Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills). “But it also is about our constitutional responsibility for oversight and for holding this and any administration accountable.”

read more | digg story

                          

“Let’s not sugarcoat it: This president is a liar. A shameless bold-face liar. And that is to our eternal shame.”

Harsh, but true. It is articles like this that provide me with at least some validation for having the arguments that I have had with close friends who maintain beliefs contrary to the facts laid out in the post, which are ones that I’ve long held.

…that this president betrayed the trust of the American people in a way no other president has done in my lifetime — not even Nixon.

I don’t expect that those with whom I’ve argued with will come around anytime soon, despite the evidence. It is not easy for anyone to admit that he or she is wrong. Particularly when the issue is of such magnitude. For now I must take solace in that articles like this one, and the links contained within it, will provide plenty of fodder for today’s historians to sort it all out for future generations.

Original Post came to Alternet.org by way of Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast at 8:34 AM on June 6, 2008.