Evidence

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html
Vice President's West Wing Office

3:20 P.M. EST

December 17, 2008

Q Sir, let me ask one first, literally talking about your own public service, seven presidencies. You left one presidency before where the President afterwards, Gerald Ford, became much more popular than he was when he left office. And I'm kind of curious, as you look at this presidency ending now and where you are in popularity, what you think will happen -- how history might look back at this presidency and President Bush compared to where he is now?

By Jason Leopold, The Public Record

An e-mail written by a senior FBI agent in Iraq in 2004 specifically stated that President George W. Bush had signed an Executive Order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.

The FBI e-mail--dated May 22, 2004--followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential Executive Order.

In a 'manual' which is officially to be released only to 'students from foreign countries on a case-by-case basis only', the US Army outlines a program of what it now calls 'irregular warfare', in fact US state sponsored terrorism, insurgency, and PSYOPS: Read more.

5 to 4-One More Vote To Tyranny
By Gene Cappa | OpEdNews.com

Cheney hints that one more vote was needed on the Supreme Court to fully implement the absolute powers of his unitary executive George W. Bush.

Cheney also argued that the President's wartime powers trump laws passed by Congress.

"The Congress has -- clearly has the ability to write statutes and has certain constitutional authorities granted in the Constitution," Cheney said. "But I would argue that they do not have the right by statute to alter presidential constitutional power. In other words, you can't override his constitutional authorities and responsibilities with a statute."

Cheney's Contempt for the Republic
by Robert Parry | ConsortiumNews.com

As Vice President Dick Cheney goes public in exit interviews about his vision of expansive executive powers, it's getting clearer how close the American Republic came to suffering major deformity – if not destruction – in the past eight years.

It is also apparent that the risks to the Republic are not over, unless incoming President Barack Obama repudiates many of the executive powers that Cheney and his boss, George W. Bush, made central to their governing style.

Did Lame Congress Enable Connell Murder?
By Ralph Lopez | War On You

Condolences to Mr. Connell’s family on this holiday season.

In many other countries this is kind of coincidence would have people spilling into the streets. The hotly disputed Ohio 2004 election count is what swung the election toward Bush, thus sealing our image in the world as fearful, hate-filled warmongers. 2000 came under the category “stuff happens.” In 2004 the world saw us actually re-elect this monster.

Karl Rove Destroyed My Life
by Paul Alexander | The Daily Beast

Excerpt: Now it’s up to Congress—and the House and the Senate judiciary committees—to bring Rove before the House Judiciary Committee....Actually, the House Judiciary Committee has already subpoenaed Rove to testify and he has refused to appear....That’s why it’s so important for the House and the Senate to hold Rove in contempt of Congress and exercise their inherent authority to enforce that subpoena by sending the Capital police to go get him and bring him in or by pursuing the thing through litigation. But one way or the other, it is critically important that the subpoena be upheld. Otherwise, it sends the message to all his accomplices that they are free to carry out their mischief in the future with impunity because nothing is going to happen to him.

By Andy Worthington, Huffington Post

In Part One of this article, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison, examined Dick Cheney's recent interview with ABC News, in which the Vice President presented a detailed defense of the administration's national security policies, throwing down a very public gauntlet to critics of torture, Guantánamo, illegal wiretapping and the invasion of Iraq. Part One focused on Cheney's lies regarding the use of torture and the implementation of warrantless wiretapping, and this second part examines his lies regarding Guantánamo and the invasion of Iraq.

5) On the prisoners in Guantánamo

by Linda Milazzo

For years since the United States invaded Iraq, I've witnessed countless photo and video images of innocent civilians - men, women, teens and children - being rudely and aggressively threatened by hired uniformed militants (mostly men), wielding guns. I've seen these images from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, Palestine, and more. Whether they be armed American military threatening Iraqis, armed Israeli soldiers threatening Palestinians, or armed Ethiopian troops threatening Somalis, the images have always disturbed me. There's an inherent injustice to such blatant imbalance of power. An injustice I suffered recently myself.

The oddity here is that unlike those less fortunate innocents in war zones who faced the guns of hired aggressors, I was not in a war zone when I faced mine. I wasn't even in a high crime zone. I was in a gentle middle class suburb, where my aggressor, an armed Brinks, Inc. security guard, was in full combat-mode performing his non war-zone duty. My aggressor more typified the machismo of a Blackwater guard than the demeanor of community-minded Brinks, when he flailed his loaded gun at me, as though he'd done it often before. My armed Brinks aggressor was not merely disrespectful. He was downright hostile and dangerous. He treated me as his enemy and freely showed me his force.

Here's how it happened:

The Movement to Try George W. Bush et al for War Crimes
by Len Hart | OpEdNews.com | Submitted by Lance Ciepiela

Members of the Bush administration and George W. Bush personally conspired to violate the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Principles and US obligations to both. Bush and key members of his administration deliberately violated US criminal codes and tried to make their crimes legal after they had already committed them. Bush and his minions embarked upon this subversive action when it was made clear to them that they could be put to death for violations of US Codes which bind the US to Geneva and other treaties that were almost insisted upon by the United States.

By Andy Worthington, Huffington Post

On December 11, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a compelling report into the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody (PDF), based on a detailed analysis of how Chinese torture techniques, which are used in US military schools to train personnel to resist interrogation if captured, were reverse engineered and applied to prisoners captured in the "War on Terror."

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

As Vice President Dick Cheney goes public in exit interviews about his vision of expansive executive powers, it's getting clearer how close the American Republic came to suffering major deformity - if not destruction - in the past eight years.
It is also apparent that the risks to the Republic are not over, unless incoming President Barack Obama repudiates many of the executive powers that Cheney and his boss, George W. Bush, made central to their governing style.

In a revealing Dec. 21 interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Cheney disclosed that he briefed congressional Republican -- and Democratic -- leaders about the administration's program of warrantless wiretapping inside the United States and that the leaders, presumably including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, endorsed the spying.

Bush shoe-thrower tells of ordeal
By Ernesto Londoño, Financial Times

Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush of the US during a Baghdad press conference last week, spent his first days behind bars believing his family and colleagues would shun him, the man's brother said yesterday.

Those guarding the 29-year-old journalist at a detention centre in Baghdad's high security Green Zone forced him to watch a television channel run by Sunni extremists loyal to Saddam Hussein. They told him it was the only outlet in the world applauding his act, the journalist's brother, Oday al-Zaidi, said yesterday after being allowed to visit him on Sunday.

Cheney’s admissions to the CIA leak prosecutor and FBI
By Murray Waas

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

By Russ Kick, The Memory Hole

Due to a FOIA request, the Pentagon has quietly released a list of all Guantanamo detainees who have been released or transferred or who have died in custody as of October 6, 2008 [PDF @ DoD].

Also be sure to download their previously released list of all DoD Gitmo detainees as of May 12, 2006 [PDF @ DoD].

Rangzieb Ahmed, a British citizen convicted last week of directing potential terrorism activities in the UK has given Cageprisoners permission to release the testimony of his unlawful detention and torture in Pakistan.

The testimony was used as part of a pre-trial session in his case where it was revealed that he was abused to the extent that his fingernails were torn out. Despite the significance of such testimony to his activities in Pakistan, the court refused to allow for the information to be made available to the jury when considering the case before them.

During his detention in Pakistan, Ahmed reveals that he was detained alongside Hassan Ghul, one of the many ‘ghost’ detainees kept in secret detention by the CIA. Ghul was detained in Iraq in 2004 and has been missing in US custody since the revelation by Ahmed.

Transcript and discussion here, further discussion here, warnings unheeded here. Guy unlikely to prosecute the gravest crimes in our nation's history because some of the bit players belonged to the Democratic Party here.

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have long known: that the White House and in particular then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report, which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable justification for launching a war.

A new report from the Nation.