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Latest Articles: Dead Constitution
Senators to Gonzales: Really? Tell Us More
Post Date: 2007-03-24 17:47:52 by aristeides
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Senators to Gonzales: Really? Tell Us More By Paul Kiel - March 24, 2007, 4:57 PM Yesterday I reported that the Justice Department had written Congress that, against the advice of Alberto Gonzales, the president had shut down an internal department investigation into the administration's wireless wiretapping program. Bush's was an unprecedented and arbitrary (and still unexplained) move. Democrats in the Senate want to know more. So yesterday Sens. Russ Feinfold (D-WI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Dick Durbin (D-IL) sent a letter following up. In particular, the senators want to know the stated rationale behind Bush's decision. They also want to see ...
The CIA's Italian Job
Post Date: 2007-03-24 12:08:53 by robin
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The CIA's Italian Job by MOHAMAD BAZZI [from the April 9, 2007 issue] Cairo From her third-floor balcony, the Egyptian woman saw the whole thing: a group of CIA and Italian agents snatching the imam of her local mosque off a Milan street, stuffing him into a white van and driving off. It was February 17, 2003, and Hassan Osama Nasr was walking to the mosque for noon prayers. He was stopped by a man waving a badge and shouting, "Police!" In perfect Italian, the man demanded Nasr's ID, wallet and cellphone. Then two men came up from behind Nasr, grabbed his arms and forced him into the van. It all took about three minutes. But the agents didn't know that someone had ...
The Witch Hunt Against Gun Owners
Post Date: 2007-03-24 01:26:21 by Brian S
7 Comments
The Witch Hunt Against Gun Owners By Michelle Malkin "The Second Amendment," Charlton Heston used to say, "is America's first freedom." The Second secures the rest. It's a message narcissistic journalists need to hear again. A decade ago, Heston chastised the media in a National Press Club speech for its collective ignorance, apathy and open hostility toward gun owners' rights: "Clearly, too many have used freedom of the press as a weapon not only to strangle our free speech, but to erode and ultimately destroy the right to keep and bear arms as well. In doing so you promoted your profession to that of constitutional judge and jury, more powerful even ...
Gonzales: Don't Blame Me, Blame Bush
Post Date: 2007-03-23 23:13:18 by aristeides
4 Comments
Gonzales: Don't Blame Me, Blame Bush By Paul Kiel - March 23, 2007, 5:59 PM President Bush shut down an internal Justice Department investigation into the administration's warrantless wiretapping program against the advice of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, according to a letter sent by a senior Justice Department official to Congress yesterday. To Democrats, it's yet another example of why Gonzales should step down. The investigation, launched in January 2006 by the Department's internal watchdog, the Office>http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/polandproc.htm">Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) -- an office created in the wake of the Watergate scandal to ...
Sampson: It's A Date! (WILL TESTIFY VOLUNTARILY THURSDAY)
Post Date: 2007-03-23 17:14:08 by aristeides
4 Comments
Sampson: It's A Date! By Paul Kiel - March 23, 2007, 4:27 PM Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee extended an invitation for Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff Kyle Sampson to testify. If he didn't want to come voluntarily, the committee said, he'd be subpoenaed. Today, via a letter from his lawyer to the committee, he accepted -- no subpoena necessary. "Mr. Sampson looks forward to answering the Committee's questions," the letter reads. "We trust that his decision to do so will satisfy the need of the Congress to obtain information from him concerning the requested resignations of the United States Attorneys." The hearing will take ...
To some in Paris (TX), sinister past is back (14 year old girl gets 7 years for shoving incident)
Post Date: 2007-03-23 15:29:49 by Red Jones
14 Comments
To some in Paris, sinister past is back In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.' By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent March 12, 2007 PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place. There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris ...
Far-reaching Gun Ban Would Cripple The Second Amendment -- McCarthy's bill to outlaw millions of guns
Post Date: 2007-03-23 11:15:08 by christine
6 Comments
The Democrats are back in power and their anti-gun wing is trying to make up for lost time as far as gun control legislation is concerned. There are a number of bills that have been introduced already, but GOA will be there to meet every challenge. Right now, we need your help in beating back a reintroduction of the so-called "assault weapons ban," the infamous bill that outlawed many types of firearms based primarily on cosmetics, misinformation and scare tactics. The bill is HR 1022, and last month it was introduced by the Queen of Gun Control, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY). Its 30 cosponsors comprise a list of the usual anti-gun suspects -- so we need to make sure that no ...
Why I Was Fired [diverse USDA explains]
Post Date: 2007-03-23 08:58:24 by a vast rightwing conspirator
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Why I Was Fired By DAVID C. IGLESIAS Published: March 21, 2007 Albuquerque WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters. Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly. United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although ...
Bush Paves the way for Martial Law: 2007 National Defense Authorization Act overturns Posse Comitatus Act
Post Date: 2007-03-23 06:57:41 by Ada
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"Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader--a dictator--willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to employ." -- Michael Ledeen, White House advisor and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago" "Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government." -- NewsMax, November 21, 2003 In October 200 ...
USDOJ: WHO WILL STOP THIS CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE?
Post Date: 2007-03-22 23:41:15 by robin
5 Comments
USDOJ: WHO WILL STOP THIS CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE?By: Devvy March 22, 2007 © 2007 - NewsWithViews.comA substantial number of Americans have heard at least part of the story of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. Theirs is the story of a corrupt Federal Department of Justice, U.S. prosecutors. They are victims of a sitting president who will unconstitutionally invade a foreign country (Iraq) based on a mountain of lies to "fight the war on terrorism," while at the same time refusing to close our Southern Border. While these two men have had their lives destroyed, as well as their families, we have a Congress full of buzzards and craven individuals who spend their time primping in ...
MADSEN ON WHITE HOUSE E-MAILS
Post Date: 2007-03-22 17:08:00 by aristeides
3 Comments
March 22, 2007 -- It is time for Congressional investigators to drive to Olney, Maryland with subpoenas in hand. The last time the Bush White House could not find e-mails was last year when it could not find 250 e-mails from 2003 on the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and Vice President Dick Cheney's smearing of her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Now the White House is missing 18 days of email traffic concerning the sacking of 8 U.S. Attorneys for political purposes. It is all reminiscent of Rose Mary Woods' 18-minute gap in recordings of Richard Nixon's Oval Office during the Watergate scandal. Last year, WMR was contacted by an anonymous source who claimed to have ...
WAYNE MADSEN'S LETTER TO GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN, CIA DIRECTOR
Post Date: 2007-03-22 16:54:00 by aristeides
2 Comments
March 22, 2007 -- Open memo to General Michael Hayden, CIA Director. General, you probably remember me when I was writing about all the whistleblowers at the National Security Agency (NSA) who criticized you for cuddling up to the Bush administration on illegal wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping, purging and setting up NSA signals intelligence analysts who did not agree with White House cookie cutter pre-ordained intelligence on Iraq or the illegal surveillance programs, wholesale outsourcing of critical NSA operations to contractors with questionable foreign connections, and other dubious NSA policies directed from the White House and the Pentagon. And General, you remember I asked ...
The Gap or "Lull" Defined
Post Date: 2007-03-22 14:33:11 by aristeides
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The Gap or "Lull" Defined By Paul Kiel - March 22, 2007, 2:24 PM OK, just for the record, I think this is the final answer on this question of an 18-day gap in the Justice Department emails. The gap supposedly occurred between November 15, 2006 when the Justice Department asked for White House approval for the purge plan, and December 4, when the White House gave the green light. DOJ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse has responded that it's less a gap than a "lull." In any case, here are all the emails that readers have found in the interim: Yesterday, we turned up a November 29th email concerning a DoJ evaluation of U.S. Attorney for San Francisco Kevin "Company ...
Snow: Congress "Doesn't Have Oversight Ability"
Post Date: 2007-03-22 14:01:12 by aristeides
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Snow: Congress "Doesn't Have Oversight Ability" By Paul Kiel - March 22, 2007, 2:41 PM Constitutional scholar Tony Snow on ABC this morning: The executive branch is under no compulsion to testify to Congress, because Congress in fact doesn't have oversight ability. So what we’ve said is we’re going to reach out to you – we’ll give you every communication between the White House, the Justice Department, the Congress, anybody on the outside, any kind of communication that would indicate any kind of activity outside, and at the same time, we’ll make available to you any of the officiels you want to talk to …knowing full well that anything they ...
E-mails on attorneys’ firings could impact privilege case
Post Date: 2007-03-22 11:43:08 by aristeides
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E-mails on attorneys’ firings could impact privilege case By Susan Crabtree March 22, 2007 As the White House prepares for a constitutional showdown over subpoenas of top administration aides to testify about the firings of U.S. attorneys, the viability of President Bush’s executive privilege argument may come down to the time-worn question: How much did the president know, and when did he know it? Democratic sources say that investigators in Congress have taken note of a brief e-mail exchange, released by the administration Monday night, which touches on this topic. But the exchange raises more questions than it answers. In an e-mail dated Nov. 15, 2006, Kyle Sampson, former ...
U.S. Judge Blocks 1998 Online Porn Law
Post Date: 2007-03-22 11:29:14 by Brian S
2 Comments
PHILADELPHIA -- A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access "harmful" material. In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech. "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week ...
Amnesty International makes Guantanamo cell replica
Post Date: 2007-03-21 20:50:20 by Zipporah
6 Comments
Amnesty International makes Guantanamo cell replica Peter Murphy says: Amnesty International has constructed a highly realistic life size replica of the Guantanamo cell where Australian David Hicks has been languishing for five years. There is a Quicktime virtual reality panorama of it on this Sydney panorama blog site. Link Reader comment: Cyril says: It might be of interest that in Düsseldorf, Germany, where I work right now, there is a quite similar exhibition by artist Gregor Schneider called 'White Torture.' From the website: The exhibition is a response to images circulating on the Internet of the United States’ maximum security facility Camp V at ...
BREAKING: regarding the sergeant-at-arms method.
Post Date: 2007-03-21 17:18:08 by aristeides
13 Comments
BREAKING: regarding the sergeant-at-arms method. by daeros [Subscribe] Wed Mar 21, 2007 at 01:17:49 PM PDT regarding using the house sergeant-at-arms I just got off the phone with a staffer of the house judiciary where I was calling about using the sergeant-at-arms if the DOJ refuses to enforce the subpeona's against karl rove and hariet miers. A staffer there informed me that they are looking into using this to enforce it. So it looks like even if they try to deflect this to the courts, they're screwed. Woohoo! Small update: I'm a tad skeptical too as noted in the comments thread. But the beautiful part about it is that if we do this it leaves the courts unable to do much ...
An Email in The Gap
Post Date: 2007-03-21 17:01:50 by aristeides
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An Email in The Gap By Paul Kiel - March 21, 2007, 4:05 PM As Josh noted and The Politico reported last night, there appeared to be an 18-day gap in the emails released by the Justice Department Monday night, a gap right after Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson said that they should run the purge plan by the White House and Karl Rove in particular. But for what it's worth, a couple of TPM readers found an email in the gap (between November 15th and December 4th). You can read the email here, in which DoJ official Michael Elston forwards a review document concerning the Nothern District of California to another DoJ employee and asks that it be printed. The U.S. ...
Paging Rose Mary Woods: '18-Day Gap' in Release of Latest Emails in 'AttorneyGate'
Post Date: 2007-03-21 16:58:24 by aristeides
9 Comments
Paging Rose Mary Woods: '18-Day Gap' in Release of Latest Emails in 'AttorneyGate' By E&P Staff Published: March 21, 2007 9:35 AM ET NEW YORK As each day passes, the phrase "shades of Watergate" appears more and more often in the press regarding the conflict surrounding the recent firing of eight U.S. attorneys. There was the hiring of former Nixon legal adviser Fred Fielding (he was once rumored to be Deep Throat) by President Bush, the selective release of documents, the threat to oppose subpoenas -- and now something reminiscent of the famous "18 1/2 minute gap." Mike Allen writes for The Politico, "In DOJ documents that were publicly ...
Snow swallows own old words
Post Date: 2007-03-21 14:26:27 by aristeides
6 Comments
Snow swallows own old words Posted by Mark Silva at 10:10 am CDT "What kinds of conversations does executive privilege protect?…What are the limits on privilege?'' a newspaper columnist wrote in the spring of 1998 on a subject strangely familiar today. "Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration,'' the columnist wrote. "Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for ...
Rudy's Gun-Control Agenda
Post Date: 2007-03-21 13:25:19 by Brian S
1 Comments
The 2007 version of Rudy Giuliani defends his past support of gun control as a necessary evil to fight crime in a big city. When pressed recently about his views on the 2nd Amendment by Sean Hannity of Fox News, Giuliani attempted to tap dance around his gun-control record without alienating the 290 million Americans who don’t live in New York City. The former mayor told Hannity that gun control was “appropriate” for the city, but that states and cities should be allowed to make those decisions locally. “So,” Hannity continued, “you would support a state’s rights to choose on specific gun laws?” “Yes, I mean, a place like New York that is ...
ADL Welcomes Congressional Reintroduction Of Federal Hate Crimes Bill
Post Date: 2007-03-21 11:45:15 by Brian S
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ADL Welcomes Congressional Reintroduction Of Federal Hate Crimes Bill New York, NY, March 20, 2007 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today welcomed the reintroduction of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2007 (LLEHCPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives. The measure, which has attracted bipartisan majority support in the past, is designed to expand coordination between federal and state law enforcement officials to address hate crimes. "We urge Congress to promptly enact this essential legislation, which would strengthen federal hate crime laws by authorizing the Justice Department to assist local authorities in investigating and prosecuting ...
White House Offer Withholds White House Documents
Post Date: 2007-03-20 17:01:09 by aristeides
6 Comments
White House Offer Withholds White House Documents By Paul Kiel - March 20, 2007, 4:18 PM Here's the letter from White House counsel Fred Fielding laying out the White House's offer to the House and Senate judiciary committees. In it, Fielding says that the documents and interviews from the Justice Department are providing Congress "a virtually unprecedented window into personnel decision-making within the Executive Branch." The interviews (private, no oath, no transcript) with White House officials, therefore, "should be conducted, if needed, only after Congress has heard from Department of Justice officials about the decision to request the resignations of the ...
Prominent Conservatives Launch Effort To Restore "Civil Liberties Under Assault By Executive Branch"
Post Date: 2007-03-20 15:53:40 by Brian S
4 Comments
Posted March 20, 2007 11:29 AM Four prominent conservative thinkers are set to launch a campaign "to restore checks and balances and civil liberties protections under assault by the Executive Branch," arguing that, "since 9/11, the President has acquired too much power." Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, who led the effort to impeach President Clinton, is one of the organizers of the effort, called the American Freedom Agenda. Others are David Keene of the American Conservative Union, writer and conservative direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, and constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served in the Reagan administration as associate deputy attorney general. At a ...
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