- Judge Michael Mukasey's nomination should have been in
big trouble given his outright refusal to condemn waterboarding as torture.
But it wasn't in trouble, thanks to a couple of Democratic leaders who
should have been at the forefront of the opposition, but weren't. As the
NY Times said Thursday, "The confirmation of Michael B. Mukasey as
attorney general seemed all but assured late this afternoon when Senators
Charles E. Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary
Committee, announced that they would vote in favor of the nominee, virtually
assuring that he would win the backing of the Judiciary Committee."
It did, and his nomination quickly went to the full Senate where six Democrats
joined the Republicans in confirming this master of deceit.
-
- The vote was 53 to 40. Glen Greenwald on Salon.com asked
why didn't the Democratic leadership filibuster the nomination which would
have forced the confirmation vote to reach 60 Yeas to cut off debate? He
also noted suspiciously that "Four Senate Democrats running for President
missed the vote, and all four had announced they oppose Mukasey's confirmation.
Thus, at least 44 Senators claimed to oppose Mukasey's confirmation --
more than enough to prevent it via filibuster." Obviously, the opposition
was more feigned than real.
-
- In the confirmation process, government apologists gave
plenty of hints they intend to continue the practice of torturing prisoners,
and will eventually seek to carve out a legal exemption for torture so
they don't have to work so hard to conceal this crime in the future. It
is frightful to see how many Republican lawmakers are slowly buying into
this evil philosophy, and who trust the government to actually limit its
use.
-
- President Bush falsely asserted that Mukasey was "not
being treated fairly" in the criticism over waterboarding. Really?
Why is it not fair to put pressure on a future Attorney General and demand
that he unconditionally renounce torture? Mukasey denied that the US practices
torture but refused to say if waterboarding was torture, claiming ignorance
of the procedure. Bush also repeated the old dodge that Mukasey had "not
been briefed" on waterboarding, so it was "inappropriate"
to ask him about it. The reporters failed to dig deeper into this patently
insulting excuse and demand why Mukasey hadn't been briefed on such a controversial
subject and why he still remains unbriefed about it.
-
- Mukasey certainly would have been watching his own confirmation
hearings on C-span when the committee took the time to hear testimony from
Malcolm Nance, former U.S. Navy instructor who trained Navy Seals to "deal
with waterboarding." He did have the courage to admit the practice
was torture. Nance was especially adamant that it was NOT simulated drowning,
but actual drowning in the slowest and most agonizing sense. That should
have qualified as a briefing for Mukasey.
-
- The PBS News Hour on Thursday night pitted Nance against
Neil Livingston, CEO of Executive Action, a self-professed "crisis
management firm," (which in reality is an insider-connected intel-disinformation
corporation with numerous ties to the dark side of government that go back
30 years). Livingston had sufficient insider knowledge of the government
plans to pull off the 9/11 attacks to predict six months in advance that
terrorists would drop both towers, and that Osama bin Laden would be behind
the attacks.
-
- Watching Livingston use every verbal technique of sophistry
to downplay and evade the admission that our government actually tortures
people was a personal exercise in anger management for me. He was a study
in the art of lying. But it paled in comparison to the utter revulsion
I felt as he actually began a well-rehearsed justification of the practice
of torture. He started off presenting the well worn Israeli justification
for torture--the hypothetical, panic inducing, worse case scenario of a
"bus full of school children with a hidden bomb on board" and
"you have a suspect who you are sure knows which bus it is on, and
you have the opportunity to save those children if you can force him to
reveal what he knows." That's a sure-fire scenario designed specifically
to induce normal people to agree that "yes, torture is justified."
But in reality, this kind of "sure" knowledge about what a terrorist
subject "knows" almost never presents itself. Nance knew it and
responded to Livingston that this was an extreme example specifically used
to build support for the use of torture.
-
- Still, Livingston insisted the president needed an exception
to the law to use torture in "special circumstances" like this.
What was particularly galling is that Livingston knew very well that no
such urgent life-saving examples existed in the past to justify US torture
of actual prisoners and suspects, and that the CIA would never limit itself
to that narrow exception if given to the president. It would simply provide
a legal loophole to cover for a multitude of indiscriminate torture. There
never has been nor will there ever be effective oversight on this evil
practice.
-
- Another justification that White House briefers fed to
gullible Republican Senators assigned to defend the Mukasey nomination
was the facile idea that "we never would have achieved the important
confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed if we hadn't subjected him to waterboarding."
Really? And how valuable is a confession so incoherent and bizarre that
the man confesses to more terror crimes than a team of ten CIA assassins
could accomplish in a decade? Mohammed confessed to everything from attacks
on the World Trade Center, the Library Tower in Calif., Sears Tower in
Chicago, Plaza Bank in Washington state, and the Empire State Building
in NY to the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II. How credible
is that?
-
- I invite all of my readers to listen to Commentator Keith
Olbermann's stirring TV editorial condemning the Bush administration for
its position on torture. "David Levin, the former U.S. Acting Assistant
Attorney General, who was himself waterboarded to determine whether or
not the act constituted torture made you into a liar Mr. Bush." Levin's
experience was compelling. He says that even though he knew his handlers
were not going to let him drown, his sense of panic was uncontrollable.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arWJ358tZgU>Click here: YouTube -
KEITH OLBERMANN SPECIAL COMMENT ON WATERBOARDING NOV 5, 2007
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- PROOF GOVERNMENT EAVESDROPPING ON ALL EMAILS
-
- The full story of AT&T's collusion with the NSA has
hit the mainstream press, and it confirms everything I have written before.
The NSA isn't just doing warrantless searches for terrorist communications,
they are gathering everyone's private emails and internet phone conversations.
Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician who blew the whistle on his
company for permitting the NSA open access to major internet access points
is now telling his story openly to Congress in hopes of denying these same
telecoms the immunity the President seeks for them.
-
- The Washington Post, while showcasing Klein's story neglected
to elucidate the implications of his revelations. "His first inkling
that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to
admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T
in San Francisco. 'What the heck is the NSA doing here?' he asked himself
[believing, as most of us do, that the NSA is only supposed to do foreign
surveillance]. "A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that,
he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he
said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and
search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional
telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into
its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many
of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.
-
- "Klein is in Washington this week to share his story
in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity
to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism
efforts." Notice the subtle disinformation by the Post staff writer.
Instead of saying, "not to grant immunity to telecommunications firms
that illegally assisted the government in spying on its users" she
uses the euphemistic, "that helped government in its anti-terrorism
efforts." This wording gives the ring of patriotic fact to a blatant
falsehood. The government is using the pretext of terrorism to install
permanent eavesdropping equipment whose primary purpose is to spy on its
own citizens.
-
- "In an interview yesterday, he [Klein] alleged that
the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from
ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T. Contrary to the government's
depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists,
Klein said, much of the data [actually, ALL of the data] sent through AT&T
to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was
analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.
-
- "He said the NSA built a special room to receive
data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing 'peering links,'
or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links
delivered 2.5 gigabits of data -- the equivalent of one-quarter of the
Encyclopedia Britannica's text -- per second, said Klein, whose documents
and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed
against the telecom giants after the government's warrantless-surveillance
program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005."
-
- After a technician showed Klein the schematics of the
NSA secret room Klein said, "'They're sending the entire Internet
to the secret room.' The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split
[fiber optic] signals from each network into two identical copies. Once
fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.
'This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style,' he said.
'The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just
AT&T's customers but everybody's.'
-
- "One of Klein's documents listed links to 16 entities,
including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services
in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern
Virginia now owned byVerizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local,
long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas;
and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data
exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange, facilities
where telecom carriers hand off Internet traffic to each other. 'I flipped
out,' he said. 'They're copying the whole Internet. There's no selection
going on here."
-
- Now on the heels of these revelations, Claudia Jones,
an AT&T spokeswoman, had the audacity to assert that "AT&T
is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy." That, of
course, is a bald faced lie. If you are an AT&T customer (formerly
Cingular) I strongly suggest you change providers when your contract expires--and
let them know why! All the major companies are participating as well, but
it will give you an excuse to penalize the primary violator of your constitutional
rights to privacy by cutting your service to AT&T.
-
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- World Affairs Brief
- Commentary And Insights On A Troubled World
- Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution
permitted.
- Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief
- http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com
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