Bush Rallies His Base - Mike Luckovich

You Think He Did All This Himself?

Boston Globe:

Cheney aide is screening legislation
Adviser seeks to protect Bush power

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | May 28, 2006

WASHINGTON—The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president’s desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials.

The officials said Cheney’s legal adviser and chief of staff, David Addington, is the Bush administration’s leading architect of the ``signing statements” the president has appended to more than 750 laws. The statements assert the president’s right to ignore the laws because they conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.

The Bush-Cheney administration has used such statements to claim for itself the option of bypassing a ban on torture, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and numerous requirements that they provide certain information to Congress, among other laws.

Children At Gitmo -- News From London

Pressure on Pres. Bush to close the "Gitmo" detainment camp has increased, with his closest ally -- Great Britain -- reacting to this latest revelation:

The notorious US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay has been hit by fresh allegations of human rights abuses, with claims that dozens of children were sent there - some as young as 14 years old.

Lawyers in London estimate that more than 60 detainees held at the terrorists' prison camp were boys under 18 when they were captured.

They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized - including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured.

The Bush administration has claimed that normal rules of war and human rights conventions do not apply to "enemy combatants" who were al-Qa'ida or Taliban fighters and supporters.

Clive Stafford Smith, a legal director of Reprieve (a London-based legal rights group) and lawyer for a number of detainees, said it broke every widely accepted legal convention on human rights to put children in the same prison as adults - including US law.

The Bush Administration is on record as saying:

Bush administration's assurances to the UK that no juveniles had been held there. "We would take a very, very dim view if it transpires that there were actually minors there," said an official.

Because the detainees have been held in Cuba for four years, all the teenagers are now thought to have reached their 18th birthdays in Guantanamo Bay and some have since been released.

A senior Pentagon spokesman, Lt Commander Jeffrey Gordon, insisted that no one now being held at Guantanamo was a juvenile and said the DoD also rejected arguments that normal criminal law was relevant to the Guantanamo detainees.

"There is no international standard concerning the age of an individual who engages in combat operations... Age is not a determining factor in detention. [of those] engaged in armed conflict against our forces or in support to those fighting against us."

The Department of Defense was forced to release a list of Guantanamo detainees for the first ever earlier this month. Besides juveniles, people suspected of being "soldiers" or enemy combatants, the list included journalists from al-Jazeera news service, who are non-combatants. The US has been accused of targeting al-Jazeera reporters and facilities, especially in one bombing raid where at least one al-Jazeera reporter was killed. The US has pled a "friendly fire" defense to these charges.

Army Covers Up Pat Tillman's "Friendly Fire" Death

The Army has launched four investigations into the death of Pat Tillman, CNN reports after receiving heavily blacked-out documents from the government.

Tillman left his professional sports career, turning down a contract offer of $3.6 million over three years from the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the United States Army in May 2002. He served in Iraq and later in Afghanistan, where he was killed at age 27.

The Pentagon disclosed to the Tillman family over a month after his death, on May 28, 2004, that he died as a result of a friendly fire incident. The family and other critics allege that the Pentagon delayed the disclosure for weeks after Tillman's memorial service out of a desire to protect the image of the U.S. armed forces.
Tillman was killed in an apparent ambush on a road near the Pakistan border in Afghanistan. The U.S. Department of Defense originally praised Tillman's heroism under fire that cost him his life while attacking the enemy.

A month later, the family was informed that Tillman's death was due to friendly fire aggravated by the intensity of the firefight. It was later learned that, in fact, no hostile forces were involved in the firefight and that two allied groups fired on each other in confusion over an exploded mine or remote controlled bomb. U.S. Army Special Operations Command, however, initially claimed that there was an exchange with hostile forces. A later investigation found that the Army was slow to correct the story of a hostile exchange of fire after learning that it was false.

Tillman's family -- especially his father -- has never been satisfied with the official version of his death, or of the diligence of the Army to present the truth.

"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation; they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

The documents reviewed by CNN show the officer who made the original decision to split the platoon was later granted limited immunity to change his testimony about who above him knew about his order. He later explained that it was only a clarification of his original testimony.

Tillman's uniform was burned by soldiers after his death. The Army's most recent investigation concludes Tillman's uniform and body armor should have been preserved, but the latest report disputes that it was burned in an attempt to cover anything up.

no one was found "grossly negligent" nor "less than truthful" in the follow-up investigations

The Army has expressed its deepest regrets to the Tillman family, and is promising the fullest accounting possible

Reporters Can Be Prosecuted

If you blow the whistle on illegal acts --- YOU could be arrested and the lawbreaker could keep on breaking the law with impunity.

That's the Bush Administration take on things, if the whistle-blower is a reporter and the law-breaker is a government official. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told ABC's "This Week:"

"We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected."

The Administration has been caught lying in several cases regarding illegal wiretaps and all-out survellance of phone and internet communications. Gonzales repeated these same lies, although the Government has been caught red-handed. Gonzales said:

... he believes journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security.

He also said:

... the government will not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, but officials would not do so routinely and randomly. ... He also denied that authorities would randomly check journalists' records on domestic-to-domestic phone calls in an effort to find journalists' confidential sources. "We don't engage in domestic-to-domestic surveillance without a court order," Gonzales said, under a "probable cause" legal standard.

President Bush has stated publicly that there is such a thing as too much free speech. And now he's shown that he's a man of action -- at least in curtailing civil liberties.

World View

Art: Pancho / Le Monde, Paris

Going Too Far . . . .

The Spying Is Even Worse ... If That's Possible

ABC News was shocked to find out that not only is the government monitoring phone calls to protect us from terrorists, they are monitoring people critical of the administration and looking for whistleblowers -- pardon me -- LEAKERS.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Not only will they break the law and cover it up, but they will intimidate anyone who tries to "rat them out."

Dick Tracy Hysteria!

If you think Dick Tracy tends to lean a little toward the right, then you might not be surprised to find that the Comic Curmudgeon agrees with you:

Um, just in case you were wondering, Dick Tracy is like TOTALLY NUTS now. How much do I love the thinly veiled Osama bin Laden character in panel one, who is wearing what appears to be a blindfold across his nose, presumably so that he doesn’t breathe in the stink of the Great Satan over his enormous cell phone? I love him a lot, that’s how much. A commentor said that they thought that “Al Kinda” (that’s the fellow apparently holding a much smaller and more modern cell phone with his foot in panel two) was an Arab caricature, but I don’t see it; he looks to me more like the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan. (The thought of a zombie Reagan working for Muslim terrorists is so delightfully bizarre that I shudder just to think of it.) The leftmost guy in panel three may look like an ethnic caricature, but he’s actually recurring character B.O. Plenty; I can provide an explanation neither for his name or his hat, just as I cannot explain the rightmost person in that panel, who I think is supposed to be either a woman or a man in the least convincing drag in the history of cross dressing.

His Lips Are Moving

To paraphrase an old Lawyer joke:

How do you know when the President is lying?

Bush Defends Scope of Domestic Spying

AP - Sat May 13, 10:05 AM ET

WASHINGTON - President Bush defended the scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs that have riled privacy advocates and threatened to impede the Senate confirmation of Bush's new pick to lead the CIA. "The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

The Domestic Spying Just Gets Worse

The President has consistently "understated" the extent of wiretapping and phone message interception in the US among rank-and-file citizens.

The New York Times broke the story of NSA warrantless surveillance in December 2005:

"President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying" as part of the War on Terror.

And then we read today in USA TODAY

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

RUMSFELD: "We need ways to make sure we're better understood in the world than we are."

SecDef Rumsfeld once again faced hecklers during a speech in Atlanta, as reported by Associated Press:

"Why did you lie to get us into a war that caused these kind of casualties and was not necessary?" asked Ray McGovern, the former analyst, during a question-and-answer session.
"I did not lie," shot back Rumsfeld, who waved off security guards ready to remove McGovern from the hall at the Southern Center for International Studies.

Rumsfeld isn't the only one getting heckled. When Condi Rice went to Australia in March, she was called a war criminal and a murderer. In April, she went to England and was followed by hecklers every stop she made. Somebody wised up and kept Rice away from the citizens during her recent trip to Greece.

The only one not getting heckled is the President -- who doesn't make public appearances unless it is before a pre-screened and loyal crowd.