To the phones!

Toll-free numbers for Congress from Katymine:

1 (800) 828 – 0498
1 (800) 459 – 1887
1 (800) 614 – 2803
1 (866) 340 – 9281
1 (866) 338 – 1015
1 (877) 851 – 6437

*******

Thanks lhp.

digg

meanwhile, right now, “Joe and Mika” in their new show on WABC radio are talking about media being too soft on….Barack Obama.

What’s wrong with this picture.

BTW, those are two different links for Selise’s phone lists. One for Senate and another for House

Ok Darth admitted it on TV I assume Dennis will bring up his articles of impeachment again?
What about the Hague? I mean a tv confession. Water boarding as Rachel pointed out is the Freakin Death Penalty!
Bush is ProDeath Penalty.

Does everybody know what the “spotlight” feature is? You click on it and it allows you to select media outlets to email this to.

I hope to see turley’s piece quoted, oh, everywhere…..

GE/NBC is paying them like they paid Reagen?

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Digg is open — let’s Digg the heck out of this so that it gets the attention it deserves. I know we are all tired and perhaps a bit discouraged, but nothing will happen unless we all stand up to Cheney and his philosophy of ‘thug-ism’. Don’t put this on the ‘to do’ list – do it right now…AND put it on the calendar throughout the holidays through January. Let them know that we are the true elephants – WE don’t forget.

Sheikh Mohammad. Olbermann’s first question to Turely: Did Dick Cheney just confess to a war crime?

Turely notes the irony of a person ….

lhp, wordpress may have let you down wrt spelling Turley a couple of times.

“So?” “So what!”

Dugg. Thanks.

That’s what kills me. Cheney thinks we are all a bunch of girlie men who won’t have the stones to bring him to justice.

If I were Obama, I would would be massively insulted.

Anyway, we ladies of the lake don’t need, erm, “jewels” we have steel ovaries. So, Dick, just keep being smug and running your big mouth. And we’ll keep grabbing screen shots.

Turley:

It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing. And that is what the citizens are doing.

There’s this gigantic yawn as we hear about a war crime on national television, being discussed matter of factly by the Vice President.

egr bold

oops.

No offense meant Professor Turley

Well, Professor, this Firepup is not yawning. and neither are our readers.

Question is, what’s afoot? WABC and MSNBC are not exactly kissin’ cousins, they are competing media troops.

I like how Mika’s so concerned about media access and press treatment of the Obama administration while the Bush Administration corruption and [war] criminal train rolls on. Where’s that outrage?

800-848-9222 — they’re inviting callers…I’m on the fly, so it’s up to you….

I’m gonna wait until the new Congress is sworn in. they are all gone now, except some committees. The Dems swept my state, so there’ no left in office at this point to even call.

My Republican tool congresswomon lost and ever since sent back this for every petition or call I made to her, “As you know, we were not returned in the last election. We are cleaning out our DC office now (I bet THAT took some work!)and cannot respond to your inquiries. For emergencies call Santa.

I wrote to her and told her she was still taking our $$ and if she didn’t wanna work for it, give it back…..no reply to that one!

They’re all a big F’ing club. We the hoi polloi…. finis

lhp, OFF TOPIC, but the very good discussions about HRC’s Senate seat yesterday didn’t make much of the fact that CK’s a Constitutional lawyer and afaik, was AWOL when the incumbency protection rackets shredded what was left of the 4th Amendment.

Darth the draft dodger thinks were girlie? Heck I and many of the folks here I’m sure have said things we know might get us arrested.
Darth has always acted with the thought that he would be pardoned the man never risks his own skin.

Read this and weep:
http://www.opednews.com/articl…..6-429.html

one day Cheney will be transiting through London and there will be a Pinochet episode ;-P. When that happens, we’ll see if there will be a Tony Blair to intervene on his behalf.

Joe’s been carrying on about this all week – feel like we should email him and ask how responsive he was to the press when he had a dead girl in his campaign office.

good men doing nothing on steroids… the “watchdog” media people like Schuster and Whitaker and Co who were pontificating and patting themselves on the back just yesterday about what they need to do during the Obama years while totally blowing off what they have not done for the last eight.

consider my bold as my shoe throwing at the punditocracy who make me want to puke as they wallow in their self-important hypocrisy.

Watch how much attention the Chee-knee story gets among the gasbags. I’m betting nada.

Evil prevails, enabled by the corporate media war industry

It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing. And that is what the citizens are doing.

Has this #%&*! read any of the Lefty Blogs in the last 5 years? I want a poll how many Americans think Bush Tortured?
How many Americans think Bush tortured innocent people? How many people think that Bush did not really care to much to investigate their innocence before torturing people.
How many people do they think Bush tortured?
Has torture found us Ossama? How does torturing Iraqi’s help us find Ossama who is in Pakistan?
How many Americans know that Bush has given Pakistan Billions but Pakistan still won’t let us go after Ossama?

Heh..mine are high tech ceramic, LHP – from Corning.

Nobody in W’s admin will ever be held accountable for anything. Obama’s dead set against it (too divisive, ya know) and the public will never demand it.

WABC is not owned by GE the parent company of NBC Joe and Mika of Morning Joe are moonlighting? Or is this another Joe and Mika and not the morning Joe people on MSNBC.

Yeah anyone else would have been investigated. When is Joe going to use his media connections to find the real killer?
OJ should be interviewed about how he was treated compared to Joe by the police.

not by an Obama AG certainly, but I suspect there will be a spate of complaints to various international venues and any number of European countries that asset claims of universal jurisdiction. Not much will come of it in the end, I suspect, but it’ll be amusing to watch the shrub & darth show try to wiggle their way out of some of the potentially very gratifying kerfuffles that’ll no doubt ensue.

I keep trying to digg and when at the digg site it tells me I have to be logged in yet the top bar gives me the option of logging out. WTF

The Media goes after OJ 24/7 but they hire Joe for the same thing?

Matthews wasn’t bad last night, his outrage meter running high.

mike, are you using FF ? if so, switch over to IE for your log in

Did it really say “call Santa”? What a load of Chutzpa!

Call the transition office of the new guy

good point–though That was kinda the point of Jane’s very first post on the Kennedy issue

Cheney’s initial crime on behalf of this administration was holding secret meetings with energy company leaders, planning the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, prior to 9/11.

His next crime was actually arson. His planning and direct involvement in sending Sysplan-controlled aircraft into the Twin Towers was done to fulfill his commitment to the shareholders of his former company, Halliburton.

When Cheney was the CEO of HAL, he made the decision to rescue the Bush Crime Family from its longtime investment in Dresser Industries, which was set to be destroyed thanks to then-pending class action lawsuits being filed related to asbestos manufactured by Dresser in the prior decades. One of the biggest problems was with the Twin Towers themselves, which were full of asbestos requiring them to be dismantled at a cost of $12 billion to the NY Port Authority, who would obviously become a party to the claim against Dresser.

Cheney ensured that it was HAL’s stock, not Dresser’s, that took the hit, losing 80% of its value once the asbestos-related class action suits were announced. The pre-planned quid pro quo was that GHW Bush and Ken Lay would use Lay’s Enron trading platform to manufacturer a phony energy crisis in California, thereby setting the stage for the public to demand that “oil experts” be installed in the White House in 2000. 9/11 was part of that plan from the outset, and Cheney was to be (s)elected VP in order to implement the plan which, among other goals, was designed specifically to ensure that HAL shareholders be made whole in the aftermath of the false flag attack on the Towers, when HAL would receive no-bid contracts to service all of the military’s needs on the ground in the Middle East.

This vast conspiracy included Arson at its core, and Cheney is guilty of arson on 9/11, among countless other crimes. Read all about it:

http://plungerspeaks.blogspot.com

We Democrats are not big on retribution, which is why the R’s run all over us.

Nobody in W’s admin will ever be held accountable for anything. Obama’s dead set against it (too divisive, ya know) and the public will never demand it.

Obama is not the voice of change but of the Establishment. As I wrote last night, those who belong to the Establshment are in fundamental agreement with Bush’s policies. They just think he either went a little too far or executed them poorly. This is the essence of the Sunstein argument that policy differences should not be criminalized. What Bush did was not that far off of what the Establishment itself would have done.

I’m sure Bush,Darth, Rummy, Feith, Wolfowitz, Condi and Harry and Nancy who signed off and were briefed about some of what went on will not be going to Europe to buy the latest Bruno Magli’s.
Holy Joe and McCain might also want to avoid the place.

Don’t think even that will happen. There will be huge pressure from Obama behind the scenes to prevent any other country from pursuing any action.

Just like Henry Kissinger got away with all.

His premise is essentially the same as Turley’s. If we don’t repudiate these crimes, we legitimize them by inaction.

SOOOOOOO

Action is called for if crimes are to remain crimes.

Got it? ACT NOW

Henry had to leave France in a hurry to avoid being picked up:)

Yep.

You have to remember – it’s not a crime if the President does it.

Sunshine

MAKE THEM PAY ATTENTION.

’spotlight’ the heck out of this

Poor Henry. /s

Uhm, WE, are the public.

So, ergo, WE must demand it. No self defeating excuses.

i like that argument. but, do you suppose she was doing work in the background? just tryin to give the woman the benefit, ya know.

My New Year’s resolution is to not do any thankless tasks, but you feel free to go for it.

No I am not using FF

There’s nobiity in thankless tasks. You know, virtue is its own reward? :-)

Do we really know Obama is against prosecution? I know he has downplayed such a thing, but really, what do you expect. If he were to be talking about how he was going after Darth and W ASAP he would be inviting a coup d’etat.

Better to lay low, get your AG in power, have AG appoint a special prosecutor, get legit legal opinions that W’s pardons do not apply to violations of international law, serve subpoenas, record Cheney destroying evidence, convict Cheney and W for spoliation and obstruction of justice.

Then, when the jerks are in custody, render them to the Hague. Ok, that last par may not be legal, but I can dream, right?

may i be the first to thank you in advance for those unnamed tasks?

sorry, that was the problem I had. but from an email I rec’d from a DKos techie, this apparently happens out of the blue – regardless of browser, provider, security suite, etc. good luck

Henry Kissinger was on Charlie Rose last night. I couldn’t bear to listen to the old war criminal. Rose then had on some goof Michael Porter from the Harvard Business School who was marveling at how well the Bush Administration has reacted to the financial meltdown. Geez, can I have a position at Harvard? At least I’m not a dumbfuck. Oh wait, that’s probably a requirement. Rats.

I know for a fact that Obama’s best lawyer friend, Cass Sunstein, is against it cause I was there at Netroots Nation when he discussed it, and tried to call him out during the question period. Here’s one of his many money quotes: We don’t want to criminalize policy differences.

May I pass all my thankless tasks to you?

that is why we have to hold their feet to the fire. lots of work ta do.

Can’t private lawsuits be brought to keep this in the public eye. If individuals can bring shit about Obama’s citizenship all the way to the SCOTUS why can’t massive class actions be brought to force.

if you need the rest, we could give it a try. not sure how long yer list might be.

What if in our current bad economy all of Europe and a few other countries start boycotting our products because we won’t prosecute Bush like a warcriminal.
Just like we did to South Africa over Apartheid?
Remember we are an export driven economy the EU would love to ban our cars. South America and China could use it as an excuse to Nationalize our factories over there and make their own cars etc.
Can we afford even the threat of a boycott now?

Thank you for posting this.

Well, some one has to have an excuse for doing them.

I actually got that New Year’s resolution printed on a page with scores of other business people in USA Today. Some year in the 90s. Mine was the only clever one. The others were things like, I’m going to cut costs or maximize profits, leading you to wonder what they had been doing before.

Thats what I’m hoping for.

eCAHN – I’m not going to argue against what you are saying about what Sunstein said. But I will argue that putting in the machinery of torture is NOT ‘policy differences’. We are not criminalizing policy differences here – we are shining the light on criminal acts and asking for action to be taken. Period.

What want to know is what is the best way for us citizens to push this forward? Who will prosecute this war crime? I don’t see Congress pusuing this – no one seems to be taking Kucinich seriously, and we know that the Republicans are not exactly planning to play nice, for example, with the Eric Holder nomination. Plus, I live in frigging Georgia, and I am tired of all of my contacts with my representatives being responded to with the “I respectfully disagree” emails.

Can President Obama get involved? He is, after all, a Constitutional Law scholar, and certainly understands the need to uphold the law. What do y’all think? His team seems to be very responsive to authoritative bodies who get together with letters signed by experts and petitions that are presented to them. Whoever starts this peition, a scholarly lawer type, I am on it like flies on shit.

We are the public – let’s demand it. Screw those worries about “divisiveness.” That’s the attitude families like my own take when little girls like myself are molested by that nice uncle who everyone loves – and so nothing gets done, and the guy molests other little girls at the school he teaches at…

This is the soul of our nation that is at stake here. I don’t think we can be taken seriously by the world if we do not stand up for what is right! We just passed the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – isn’t it about time we paid a little attention to it?

You need to be inbred and ride the small school bus too!

To commit war crimes or not is a mere “policy difference”? The rich. It reminds me of a passage in The Banality of Evil where Eichmann’s attorney claimed that his client “knew nothing of these medical matters.” To him the slaughter of millions of human being was a mere medical matter.

I agree it’s not a “policy difference.” I had to pick my jaw up off the floor when Sunstein described it that way.

I tried to spotlight. I selected my local newspapers, completed the form and hit “preview” — but I do not believe it was transmitted. How does one send the spotlight on — I did not get to the “Shine” button.

Xenos, a” that stuff can only happen if we, the left, give him political cover.

We have to demonstrate that there is a national mood for this kind of accountability. We have to get the MSM revved up to beat the drums for this. We have to get pollsters to begin polling on this issue.

We have to prime the pump.

Tell that to Cass. I’m not agreeing with him, just reporting what he said.

Burt Neuborne – Brennan Center/NYU lobbies diligently for criminal prosecution, but also makes the point that a commission would serve the purpose of public shaming of these traitors and making them toxic to any potential post-Bush employers. I concur heartily

Cass Sunstein is one voice. he could be drowned out. It will take A lot of voices to do that. We have to build a vocal army

That’s why there a telecom suits in front of Judge Walker even as we speak, er, type

Afraid to publish the entire truth?

Not sure what to do as far as contacting my congress critters. One Sen. is retiring, another is to be named as Sec of Interior today. My congressman is leading candidate to be named as SEN. Musical chairs.

we have more coming in January. I just want you all to start calling now. phones are notoriously quiet on Capital Hilla t this time of year. that means that your phone message has a much higher liklihood of getting eyeballs if you make them this week and next.

In this way, when we roll out further action in January, it will be to someone who already knows that voters are concerned about this issue. you are preparing the ground for the seeds that are soon to be planted, so they can–hopefully–sprout and bear friut.

wow, that sounded almost biblical. :-)

lhp! Thanks for the great Leadership!

Bush and Cheney took it upon themselves to Act for All of US. Some of their actions included Torturing Other Human Beings.

If We don’t Speak-Up against Bush’s Torture, then We mutely Own It – and We will be Held Accountable by those who know Right from Wrong, Just Like Bush will be held Accountable.

If We stay silent, then his Disgrace will be Our Disgrace.

Let’s fight the good fight and tell Congress that We Do Not Torture – let’s be clear and put this Heinous Act of Depravity on Bush and Cheney, where it belongs!

Bush and Cheney’s War Crimes are Bush and Cheney’s War Crimes.

They didn’t ask Our consent to Commit the Crimes, let’s not give them Our consent to Avoid Their Responsibilities, either.

In a debate with Glenn Greenwald, Sunstein backed off some and made the same point you did, namely that emotion plays a big part, meaning (I presume) that it’ll take public outrage to get these bastards prosecuted:

When I talk about a fear of criminalizing political disagreement, I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t criminalize crimes. Crimes are against the law, and if there’s been egregious wrongdoing in violation of the law, then it’s not right to put a blind eye to that. So I guess I’m saying that emotions play an important role in thinking about what the legal system should be doing. But under our constitutional order, we go back and forth between the emotions and the legal requirements, and that’s a way of guaranteeing fairness.

The transcript and video are here: http://www.democracynow.org/20…..ates_glenn

Using katymines numbers for the umpteenth time.
Sometimes I wonder if my hundreds of calls are worth the effort? Then I think of Barbara’s David, Quaker Girl, and countless others who have inspired, consoled, cajoled, and nurtured my raging anger at the outrages against humanity committed by officials of my country.

To the phone(barricades). If not me,who?

Thanks for the inspiration LHP.

That’s part of the reason I endorse the commission idea. it serves multiple purposes,

1) even actions that are not crimainal, or for which the stature of limitatiosn ahs expired, may be so shameful that exposure will effectively ban the perpetrator from future power

2) it makes it possible to weed out crimes from “policy differences” and refer only the crimes for prosecution.

3) public examimnation, as opposed to secret grand jury porocedings, provides the kind of sunshine disinfectant that we really need

call transition office and office of any in your state likley to be in the next congress

Wigwam, Thank you
Now i feel a follow up post coming on. kinda like the vapors…. *g*

That’s why I pushed back at Sunstein at NN, to make sure he realizes that everybody does not agree with him. The other 3-4 questioners did the same thing.

Yesterday (12/16) a message from Internet Explorer crawled across the bottom of BBC screen advising that I/E had a serious security problem and everyone should switch to another browser until the problem was fixed. One report said I/E was to issue an update today.

I had to reload FireFox, then log in anew to DIGG and check “remember”.
I may have to log in again when I switch back to I/E.

Your problem may be caused by the I/E problem.

I certainly agree with the notion that it’ll take emoton, namely indignant outrage, to get Obama to do the right thing. The trail of guilt has now definitively led to the Oval Office. We know who the perpetrators are, and it’s not just a few bad apples at low ranks. But even the low ranking bad apples have been prosecuted. Specialist Graner is serving a ten-year sentence. Now it’s time to go after the big fish.

Never understood why the scapegoats didn’t try to incriminate up the chain of command. Guess their lawyer’s didn’t have the resources to do it.

Glenzilla has up an article contrasting the morality problems of Spitzer and Cheney: http://www.salon.com/opinion/g…..index.html

Graner and his attorney claimed that he was “following/implementing ordes,” but the military would let anyone up the line testify.

Oops! That “would” should be “wouldn’t.”

Congress has spoken, through Pelosi that the Prez is above the law and they will not budge on acting on war crimes. The Levin/McCain report is proof of Congressional (in)action. The report reached many conclusions and had no recommendations or action items. My Congress critters Lungren, Boxer & DiFink are less than useless on accountability, while the Citizenry are in full avoidance, watching UFC, WWF, Americas Next Top Model, etc, etc.

How did they prevent officers from testifying? Were there not subpoenas? Did they claim “national security?”

Now that Difi is the new Chair of the Intelligence Committee that will be appropriate. She can do what she does best in complete secrecy.

It was a military trial, where the accused has far fewer options. But I don’t recall the details.

Well we were all shocked and digusted years ago when we became aware of the torture in the “interrogation camps”. We wrote letters .emailed sen.,Gov., etc. Then the oscar winning documentary “Taxi tales fom the darkside” was produced and we watched it in horror and lost another few days of sleep. Once again we wrote letters ,made phone calls, emailed the powers that be. NOW Cheney publicly admits being aware of the torture,helping to get “the process cleared” and fully supporting it.Yes I will write my letters,make my phone calls.My question is what is it going to take to make this administration accountable for their crimes and the desacration of our Constitution and our Country?

My question is what is it going to take to make this administration accountable for their crimes and the desacration of our Constitution and our Country?

It appears that the Republicans are going to try to block Holder’s appointment. They will certainly be successful if liberals will not support him. And, IMHO, liberals should not support him until and unless he makes it clear that he intends to prosecute all criminals without distinction as to race, religion, color, creed, party affiliation, or high station.

BRING ‘EM TO JUSTICE!

What’s wrong with “Spotlight”? I tried twice to spotlight this post, but at the end, after I click on Preview, I am told I made an error. This has never happened to me before on Spotlight.

Anyway, I saw this same segment last night, and just about jumped out of my chair when Turley claimed the public didn’t seem to care. Let’s give them an earful!

Bob in HI

That lack of mens rea excuse has a couple of blatant things that make it die a fast death. First is the repeatedly reported admissions (and even some of the arguments pled to courts) that the programs were conducted overseas specifically to attempt to escape jdtn of US courts Why not bring em home and torture them in Bush’s basement if you had no mens rea? Why go through the elaborate machinations of GITMO and the black sites and issue OLC memos about being safe from the courts’ jdtn if you thought that the 1/3 of the US gov that interprets the law would think you weren’t breaking it?

Second is the “classification” that has now perhaps been argued by Mukasey to be atty-client privilege instead, of the LEGAL REASONING sections of OLC memos. It’s pretty laughable to claim good intentions when you don’t want anyone to see the reasoning (not the facts of a program operations, but the legal reasoning) in the memos. Which weren’t issued anyway when some of the actions were taken and which probably were not “delivered” to the action takers anyway.

Oh well.

I want to give her the benefit of the doubt too, especially, because it looks like she’s a damn super-lock.

In the FISA fight massacre imho, we needed people with “name recognition” such as CK out front.

Yukio Asano spent 15 years in hard labor after being convicted of water boarding American POW’s during WW2.

Sadly, I think the infamous “handwriting on the wall” was Obama’s vote on the FISA Bill. This was a clear choice between upholding the rule of law or allowing the Bush Crime Family to escape accountability. After campaigning against the bill, he voted for it. Politically, it didn’t gain him a single vote on Nov. 4, but I know of one he lost to a third party-mine. Leahy’s allowing the GOP to tell him they need more time to propagandize against the nomination of Holder for AG is most telling. Protection against prosecution for Democrats who enabled War Crimes is more important than supporting The Constitution it appears. That approach didn’t work-out very well in Hitler’s Germany. It will cost us our Democracy if The People remain The Sheeple.

Why not bring em home and torture them in Bush’s basement if you had no mens rea? Why go through the elaborate machinations of GITMO and the black sites and issue OLC memos about being safe from the courts’ jdtn if you thought that the 1/3 of the US gov that interprets the law would think you weren’t breaking it?

Their claim is that it was/is legal to torture non-citizens outside of U.S. borders, because — get this — the U.S. filed a reservation along with ratification of the Convention Against Torture that we would interpret torture in the sense of the U.S. Constitution. Alberto’s artful dodge is that the Constitution doesn’t protect non-citizens outside U.S. borders, so whatever we do to them isn’t torture. (Indeed, Alberto tortures logic worse than the CIA tortures detainees.)

But Mr. Gonzales revealed that during his tenure as White House counsel, the administration twisted this straightforward standard to make it possible for the CIA to subject detainees to such practices as sensory deprivation, mock execution and simulated drowning. The constitutional amendments, he told the committee, technically do not apply to foreigners held abroad; therefore, in the administration’s view the torture treaty does not bind intelligence interrogators operating on foreign soil. “The Department of Justice has concluded,” he wrote, that “there is no legal prohibition under the Convention Against Torture on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment with respect to aliens overseas.”

More here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..Jan25.html

And this comes on the tail of the Congressional report finding Cheney’s pal, Donald Rumsfeld culpable in the decision to torture prisoners as well. See: http://globalinvestmentwatch.c…..-strategy/

If anyone is driving by, MoveOn.org is holding its Agenda-setting vote. You have to log in first, or join if you’re not a member. Last week they held their issues “primary”, and this week they’re voting which of last week’s top 10 issues should be their top three priorities next year.

One of the choices is “Hold the Bush Administration Accountable.”
When I voted, I made it my #1 choice. Its tough, though, getting only 3 choices when there is so much needing attention.

Bob in HI

On the subject of Cheney’s “confession”:

Rather than regarding Cheney’s admissions on torture, and other war crimes, as another blatant “so what” from the Bush cast of characters, his remarks are, more likely than not, a set-up for the pardon which Dubya will bestow on him before Jan. 20, as sure as God made green apples.
Watch for others from the Bush rouges gallery to make similar statements in the next month.

On the chance you might read this, I just want to say in answer to your last three words on your site…of course they did! I figure that there is enough information in print and on video for the trial to last about three years. Shorter, if the neo cons start to ‘rat’ on each other.

You have a lot of information in one place. No Sibel Edmunds, though? Valerie Plame Wilson called Sibel’s information stunning.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5685

It was my #1 choice, too, Bob

It’s not too late. 9112010.com