Category: White House

Justice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Torture Allegations

Posted on by TL

We may finally begin to see justice restored in the United States of America.

Breaking news from The New York Times:

The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand.

The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.

President Obama, it’s time to lead and let justice be served.

Gov. Howard Dean: The Democrats Need to Grow a Pair

Posted on by TL

I had the privilege of attending Netroots Nation Friday as a member of the media for Turning Left. Former Governor Howard Dean held a town hall meeting at 9:00 a.m.  I’m currently working on transcribing his comments, and I’ll publish that story tomorrow.

However, I want to share one quote that Dr. Dean shared with me when I had the opportunity to speak with him during the book signing that followed his presentation.

I stood in a rather long line, and Dr. Dean was extremely gracious with each person who came for his autograph in the book Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer.  When I finally reached the good doctor, I shook his hand and thanked him.

I then told him, if I had the chance during the large town hall meeting, I would have asked him, “When are the Democrats going to grow some, stand up, and fight for health care reform?”

Dr. Dean responded by reiterating what he said to the larger group,  “The Blue Dogs are Democrats,” he said.  “They are Democrats.”

“Ideologically?”  I asked.

“They are Democrats,” Dean repeated.  “But, you’re right.  They do need to grow a pair.”

Those were his exact words.

In the town hall gathering, Dr. Dean told Netroots Nation that the “Conserva-Dems” have done us a favor in the health care reform debate.  Dean noted that the Conserva-Dems are the only group at the table truly representing conservative Americans.  The Republicans have removed themselves from the table, Dean said.  They have chosen to not participate in the health care reform debate.  The Conserva-Dems, or Blue Dogs, are the only truly conservative voice at the table.

That being said, Dean told Netroots Nation the Democrats have already compromised with conservatives in that single-payer health care is off the table.

“There will be no more compromise,” Dean said.

It’s time for the Democrats to fight for the change this country needs.

Stand up now, Dems! And grow a pair.

UK Newspaper Dispels Myths About National Health Care

Posted on by TL

I’ve had it with the fringe right-wing health-insurance-industry-paid screaming white lunatics screaming at congressional town hall meetings.  Homeland Security needs to keep an eye on these nuts and their racist-driven attacks.

Calmer minds are prevailing in the media.  The UK’s The Guardian has begun taking these arguments to task.  Even the United Steel Workers are standing up to unmask the lunatic fringe doing the bidding of the for-profit health insurance industry:

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley has claimed that U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, 77, would not be treated for his brain tumor if he was in Britain because he is too old.

The newspaper reports that this is just not true, according to Britain’s Department of Health. “There is no ban on anyone of any age receiving any treatment,” said a spokesman. “Whether to prescribe drugs or recommend surgery is rightly a clinical decision taken on a case by case basis.”

An e-mail circulating in the U.S. claims that in England, anyone over 59 years old cannot receive heart repairs, stents or bypass because it is not covered as being too expensive and not needed. The Guardian reports that this is totally untrue.

“Growing numbers of patients over 65 with heart conditions are having surgery, including valve repairs and heart bypass surgery,” says Professor Peter Weissberg, the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) medical director. For example, the average age at which people have a bypass operation has risen from 58 in 1991 to 66 in 2008.

San Francisco-based thinktank Pacific Research Institute has been saying that in Britain, breast cancer kills 46 percent of patients, compared with 25 percent in the U.S. They claim prostate cancer kills 57 percent of the Britons it strikes, compared with 25 percent of American victims; and that Britain’s heart attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s in 2005.

Breast cancer does claim more lives, proportionally, in the U.K. than in the U.S., but no where near the difference some claim, according to the 2002 database run by the World Health Organisation’s cancer advisers. For example, 19.2 of every 100,000 Americans die of breast cancer disease, compared to 24 percent in Britain. With heart attacks, 40 percent of Britons who suffer one die from it compared to 38 percent in the States.

And there’s more.

The violent and threatening thugs are not mainstream America.  They are servants of the health insurance industry, and they are getting dangerous, bringing firearms to congressional town hall meetings.

And it turns out everything they say is laughably unscientific and false.

Clarence Page is Spot On with GOP Health Care Scare

Posted on by TL

Stop by the the Chicago Tribune.  Clarence Page wrote a column about the scare tactics the birthers and other GOP servants are spreading regarding any attempts at true health care reform currently before congress.

From Clarence Page:

They have been aided in this mission by a key figure in the killing of Bill and Hillary Clinton‘s proposed health-care reforms in the early 1990s. Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, a conservative health-care specialist, lit the spark on various op-ed pages and talk shows, including former Sen. Fred Thompson‘s radio talk show.

There she told Thompson that “Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.”

McCaughey added that the bill “expressly says if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period, you have to go through that session again, all to do what is in society’s best interest or your family’s best interest and [basically] cut your life short.”

Nonsense. The provision would require Medicare to pay for advanced-care consultations, but it does not requireindividuals to take advantage of the benefit.

Nor does it require that a government bureaucrat intervene among the patient, the patient’s family or a doctor or nurse practitioner, as McCaughey insists it does.

Look: read Mr. Page’s column.  We have to stay on message.  We must reform health care.  This will not be a repeat of the Clinton-era attempts at health care reform.  We know those who object to reform for who they are: they serve the health insurance industry.

They do not serve the American people.

Bill Clinton’s Lightning Diplomacy Frees 2 Journalists Held in North Korea

Posted on by TL

This just in from the WTAE Pittsburgh:

North Korea said Tuesday that two detained American journalists have been pardoned. The announcement came after news reports that former President Bill Clinton met Tuesday with the two journalists. ABC News reported that a government source with knowledge of the mission said Clinton’s meeting with journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee was very emotional.

The source was hopeful that Ling and Lee would leave North Korea on Tuesday night for the United States, ABC reported.

Earlier, Clinton met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il during his surprise mission to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of the two reporters, holding “exhaustive” talks on a wide range of topics, state-run media said.

Clinton “courteously” conveyed a verbal message from President Barack Obama, the official Korean Central News Agency said in a report from Pyongyang. Kim expressed his thanks, and engaged Clinton in a “wide-ranging exchange of views on matters of common concern,” the report said.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, however, denied Clinton went with a message from Obama. “That’s not true,” he told reporters.

I don’t know what was said behind closed doors, but this was incredibly fast. The fact that Clinton is not a member of the Obama Administration no doubt gave him greater flexibility in dealing with Kim Jong Il.

I look forward to hearing former President Clinton speak about this trip when he returns to the United States.

I especially look forward to hearing from Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

And I am incredibly impressed.

Kenyan Officials Flummoxed Over ‘Birther’ Controversy

Posted on by TL

I found it amusing that representatives of the Kenyan government are completely baffled by claims from the ‘birthers’ that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

From the Washington Independent:

Jon Chessoni, a first secretary at the Kenyan Embassy in Washington, can’t understand why his office gets so many baseless questions about whether Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

“It’s madness,” said Chessoni on Monday. “His father, in 1961, would not even have been in Kenya. When this matter first came up, the Kenyan government did its research and confirmed that these are all baseless claims.”

Nonetheless, Chessoni spent part of his day fielding inquiries about an image posted at the fringe conservative web site WorldNetDaily–a purported “certified copy of registration of birth” belonging to “Barack Hussein Obama II,” submitted by attorney Orly Taitz in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, part of her undying quest to get a judge to listen to the conspiracy theories about the 44th president of the United States. “I’m forcing the issue, where Obama will have to respond,” Taitz told the Website. “I am asking the judge to give me the power to subpoena the documents from the Kenyan embassy.”

Chessoni didn’t understand what Taitz was talking about or what her discovery (the gift of an “anonymous source” who’s “afraid for his life”) was supposed to prove. He showed the image to other embassy employees, who rolled their eyes at what was, for some, only the latest forgery being passed off as an official document from Kenya. “It’s a red herring,” said Chessoni. “Maybe there are not enough facts out there.”

The “birth certificate” is bogus.  We did our own debunking here on Turning Left, including the delicious revelation — which I haven’t seen reported elsewhere, by the way — that Orly Taitz misspelled her own name when she cited her Web site on the document she claims is Obama’s birth certificate.

Through all this malarkey, I can’t help but think through to that day in Matteson, IL, a few years ago, when I saw then State Senator Barack Obama sitting in his car, waiting patiently for a “Green Rally” to begin.  This event was about money for the south suburbs of Chicago, not about the environment at all.  There sat State Senator Obama, and no one noticed, except Mayor John Ostenburg of Park Forest, IL.  John stopped to chat with the man running for the U.S. Senate.

And no one else hardly noticed Obama was there.

How times have changed.

Get over it, Birthers.  Barack Obama is an American citizen, and these ridiculous attempts to prove otherwise are, well, just damn silly anymore.

FBI’s Edmonds: Bin Laden Worked for U.S. Until 9/11

Posted on by TL

What a bombshell.

From The Brad Blog:

During my recent interview with FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds on the Mike Malloy Show, a caller had asked her opinion on whether she believed 9/11 to have been “an inside job.”

Edmonds replied by first specifying “As I have done for the past 7 or 8 years, I have basically stuck with what I know, first-hand, directly, my own knowledge, based on my own experience, based on what I obtained, which is not a lot, but it is extremely important.”

After explaining the difference between what she does and doesn’t know first hand, she went on to explain: “I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban – those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.” …

Her complete response, pulled from the lengthy interview (full, commercial-free audio here) has been transcribed by Luke Ryland, perhaps the world’s foremost expert in all things Sibel Edmonds related.

From Luke Ryland on the Daily Kos:

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”

These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.

Luke’s summary:

The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.

It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.

The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.

Puts an entirely different spin on Bush ignoring that PDB.

What did George W. Bush know, and when did he know it?

Republicans: Defending the Insurance Industry Over Your Dead Body

Posted on by TL

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Watch and enjoy as Rachel Maddow once again brialliantly unmasks Republican lies on the health care debate.

Republicans: defending the insurance industry over your dead body.

Lucia Whalen Called 911; Now Leave Her Alone

Posted on by TL

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Lucia Whalen is completing what she says will be her one and only news conference.  Her voice trembling at times, close to tears, Mrs. Whalen spoke about threats that had been made against her, calling her racist and other names.  Her husband did weep openly a few times as she spoke.  Below is a video of MSNBC and other news organizations trailing her in paparazzi-like fashion as she and her husband left their home in preparation for their transit to the site of the press conference. Above is the press conference itself.

Her lawyer spoke first.  Coyly referring to the three men who behaved badly sitting down for a beer tomorrow at the White House, Wendy Murphy simply said, “Maybe it’s a guy thing,” that her client was not invited.

From MSNBC:

The woman whose 911 call led to the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a national debate on racial profiling spoke publicly for the first time about the case Wednesday, saying she was unfairly criticized and “afraid to say anything” after being called racist.

It’s easy for the President of the United States to turn into Pontificator-in-Chief, and that’s exactly what he did in this case.  I suspect the police acted appropriately, but I don’t know.  I wasn’t there.  There’s are strong reasons for police asking Henry Louis Gates Jr. to step outside his house, first and foremost to ensure there was no one inside with intent to harm him.

Enough.  I’m not going to get into that.  Let these three chaps sit down and drink a pint or two.  Lucia Whalen did the right thing.  She called 911 because she saw suspicious activity.  She acted and spoke appropriately when she called police.

Now leave her alone.  She and her husband have a right to privacy.  She is not a public official.  She is not public property.  She is an American, born in this country. Yes, one of the brilliant reporters picked up that she had slightly darker skin than white Americans, and had to ask if she was a citizen.  And to the reporter who asked that question, I say, “Way to go for working to keep us safe from any threat of foreigners calling 911, you arrogant ass.”

Mrs. Whalen, thank you.  You did exactly what we ask citizens to do in our town when they see suspicious activity.

And to the three who started the fire or helped make it worse, enjoy your beer, and find it in your hearts to thank Mrs. Whalen.

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