alanshemper:

soul-hammer:

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 [2005] - Michael Chertoff, who has been picked by President Bush to be the homeland security secretary, advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the legality of coercive interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture statute, current and former administration officials said this week.

Depending on the circumstances, he told the intelligence agency, some coercive methods could be legal, but he advised against others, the officials said.

Mr. Chertoff’s previously undisclosed involvement in evaluating how far interrogators could go took place in 2002-3 when he headed the Justice Department’s criminal division. The advice came in the form of responses to agency inquiries asking whether C.I.A. employees risked being charged with crimes if particular interrogation techniques were used on specific detainees.

Mr. Chertoff’s division was asked on several occasions by the intelligence agency whether its officers risked prosecution by using particular techniques. The officials said the C.I.A. wanted as much legal protection as it could obtain while the Justice Department sought to avoid giving unconditional approval.

[…] One current and two former senior officials with firsthand knowledge of the interaction between the C.I.A. and the Justice Department said that while the criminal division did not explicitly approve any requests by the agency, it did discuss what conditions could protect agency personnel from prosecution….

[archive.org copy of the NYT article]

zvaigzdelasas:

Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge (Published 2006)

The American effort of the last year has occasionally included trips to Somalia by Nairobi-based C.I.A. case officers, who landed on warlord-controlled airstrips in Mogadishu with large amounts of money for distribution to Somali militias, according to American officials involved in Africa policy making and to outside experts. […]

The details of the American effort in Somalia are classified, and American officials from several different agencies agreed to discuss them only after being assured of anonymity. The officials included supporters of the C.I.A.-led effort as well as critics. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the American Embassy in Kenya. […]

Several news organizations have reported on the American payments to the Somali warlords. […] The extent and location of the C.I.A.’s efforts, and the extent of the internal dissent about these activities, have not been previously disclosed.

Indeed, some of the experts point to the American effort to finance the warlords as one of the factors that led to the resurgence of Islamic militias in the country. They argue that American support for secular warlords, who joined together under the banner of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, may have helped to unnerve the Islamic militias and prompted them to launch pre-emptive strikes. The Islamic militias have been routing the warlords, and on Monday they claimed to have taken control of most of the Somali capital. […⁰

“You’ve got to find and nullify enemy leadership,” one senior Bush administration official said. “We are going to support any viable political actor that we think will help us with counterterrorism.” […]

Senior American officials indicated this week that the United States might now be willing to hold discussions with the Islamic militias, known as the Islamic Courts Union [editors note; al shabaab emerges from the ICUs military wing in 2006]. […]

2006

Something you have to understand about recent American history is that the Republican party lost its shit in the 1960s. There are always plenty of reasons for decades-long historical trends, but arguably the core one is that Lyndon Johnson’s administration made a bunch of human rights advances known collectively as the Great Society, the cornerstone of which was a sincere and substantive effort to address the unfinished business of Reconstruction with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Racist white people who didn’t want to share democracy with everyone else became reliable Republican voters, but they’re nowhere near enough to win an election on their own. Republicans realized that their ideology is a miserable death cult that can’t win a fair fight. They could have gotten better ideas, but instead, they started sabotaging democracy.

I am not here to overwhelm you with a list of all the American right wing’s assaults on democracy. But there is a relatively narrow subset which forms a pattern that has become increasingly urgent: times Republicans have abused, usurped, or radically and unilaterally bastardized the power of American government in order to limit voters’ ability to hold them accountable in free and fair elections.

Because it only includes events backed up by reliable and freely available sources, it necessarily only includes the times times they were ham-fisted or sloppy enough to get caught. It has over two dozen entries and is almost certainly incomplete.

• 1968:Richard Nixon sabotages peace talks to end the Vietnam War because anger over the war is a winning campaign issue for him. Johnson catches him and calls him out, but doesn’t tell the public. Nixon wins and takes office.
• 1972: Nixon’s re-election campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (or CREEP, because these people are fucking Bond villains) goes on a crime spree which includes multiple break-ins at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.
• 1992: President George H.W. Bush asks British Prime Minister John Major’s government to dig through official archives for anything compromising on his rival Governor Bill Clinton from Clinton’s time at Oxford University.
• 1992: A political appointee at the Bush State Department has Governor Clinton’s passport files searched for potentially embarrassing information.
• 1992: Bush’s Attorney General William Barr pressuresfederal prosecutors in Arkansas to make some public movement on a white collar crime case tangentially associated with Governor Clinton.
• 2000: The Florida state board of elections does a racist voter purge, targeting largely Democratic communities of color.
• 2000: A mob, mostly Republican congressional aides, force election officials in Palm Beach County to shut down its recount.
• 2000:Five Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents shut down the Florida recount in an unsigned opinion so specious and nakedly partisan that it irreparably damages the legitimacy of not only the Bush presidency but the Supreme Court itself.
  
• 2004: Republican election administrators in Florida attempt another racist voter purge, only abandoning it when they get caught.
• 2006: The Bush administration leans on federal prosecutors to influence the midterm elections with bogus investigations into Democratic politicians and prosecutions of non-existent “voter fraud” cases. After Republicans lose the midterms, several attorneys who resisted the pressure are fired.
• 2010:Five Supreme Court justices appointed by Republicans, in an existential fiat, reclassify money as speech, opening the floodgates to swamp every level of politics with dark money.
• 2013: The same five Republican Supreme Court justices gut the Voting Rights Act, specifically and explicitly because it has been relatively effective in preventing racist voter suppression.
• 2010s:Republicans in various state legislatures pass a bunch of laws to suppress the ability of voters to hold them accountable.
• 2016:Associates of Trump consigliere Rudy Giuliani loudly and unprofessionally conduct numerous bullshit investigations into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. They successfully pressure FBI director James Comey – himself a veteran of the corrupt and politicized Bush Justice Department – into several improper and decisive actions against Clinton.
• 2016:Donald Trump conspires with Russian intelligence and business interests to sabotage his opponent in a presidential election.
• 2016: Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnellblackmails the Obama administration out of explaining the Russian government’s sabotage of the presidential election, leaving state boards of elections and the general public vulnerable to the assault.
• 2017-18:The Republican administration sits on evidence that Russian military hackers have penetrated state voting equipment.
• 2018: Republican Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp insists on overseeing the election in which he is running for governor. He squeaks out a “win” after purging thousands of voters, arbitrarily closing or refusing to equip polling places, and baselessly accusing his Democratic opponent of trying to hack the election.
• 2018: A Republican congressional campaign in North Carolina hires operatives to defraud local senior citizens who were attempting to cast absentee ballots.
• 2018:Republicans lose the governorships in Wisconsin and Michigan, but keep control of the state legislatures due to gross gerrymandering. Before the new governors can be sworn in, they cram through laws stripping power from the incoming Democratic governors.
• 2019:Trump administration officials try to warp the data which will be collected in the 2020 census in a way that will enable future gerrymandering by undercounting largely Democratic constituencies. When they get caught and stopped, they try to justify themselves by lying to the federal courts.
• 2019: Donald Trump privately tries to extort the president of Ukraine into announcing bullshit investigations into prominent Democrats during the 2020 election.
• 2019:Donald Trump publicly pressures the government of China into opening bullshit investigations into prominent Democrats during the 2020 election.
  
• 2019: All but one House Republican opposes impeaching Trump for his extortion of Ukraine – until that one guy is pushed out of the party. Therefore, no House Republicans vote to impeach Trump.
• 2020:With one exception, every Republican in the Senate validates Trump’s attempts to rig the 2020 election by voting to acquit him.
• 2020:Republicans dig in their heels and refuse to take easy and obvious steps to keep voters safe from COVID-19 at the polls.

This is just the list of things that I could remember off the top of my head and could find receipts for with relative ease. It doesn’t include things that are plausible but unproven, like the allegations that Reagan’s 1980 campaign staff tried to repeat Nixon’s first stunt by working to prolong the Iran hostage crisis because it was a winning campaign issue for him. It doesn’t include dirty, bigoted campaigns that you might call awful but lawful, like the racist “Willie Horton” ad campaign in 1988 or the repulsive homophobic ballot initiatives that were engineered to bolster George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. It doesn’t include the wide array of brutalizations of a constitutional small-d democratic system which aren’t specifically and concretely about elections – everything from eroding the credibility of scientists, experts, and reporterstopacking the courts with proto-fascist hacks to lying the American people into war in Iraq.

It really doesn’t matter whether or not I think Republicans win elections legitimately. It’s extremely important that Republicans do not believe they can win elections legitimately.

Now think for a second about their cherished “voter fraud” trope. All this time, Republicans have been screeching that SOMEONE was out there trying to steal elections FROM THEM. It is absolutely correct to focus on and be upset about the racist history and intent of this particular conspiracy theory. I would simply argue that white supremacism is not the only unforgivable aspect of this nonsense trope. The other is the way those claims make it impossible to deal with actual threats against legitimate elections.

This is similar to what psychologists call projection, or the tactic domestic violence experts refer to as DARVO. It is not unrelated to “swiftboating” or the phenomenon students of genocide refer to as the “accusation in a mirror.” It is the axiom small children cite when they say “he who smelt it, dealt it.”

I don’t know the ONE WEIRD TRICK to make it not work. I just know that it – maddeningly – does work, not least on the Very Serious Experts whose ONE FUCKING JOB it is to know better.

So I’m sorry to disappoint if you were expecting a “many bad people on all sides” disclaimer about who does political dirty tricks, but “both sides” is not operative,no matter how desperate the hot-take-industrial-complex is to make fetch happen. It hasn’t been operative for twenty-five years, and it’s really not operative for the next six months. You can bury yourself deep in literature about asymmetric polarization, but you don’t have to do all that to understand what’s important here. Democrats support democracy and want to stop the plague, Republicans support the plague and want to stop democracy, and you should be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims not to know the difference.

Imagine that.

A number of times where a gunman was legally capable of buying the weapons they used to kill people. It’s almost as if the ban on the sale of AR-15’s that ended in 2004 could have prevented a majority of the mass shootings that’s occured since. It would still be in effect if it hadn’t been given a 10-year limit. All the Constitutional challenges to the Ban failed to make a case in that whole time, too.

I doubt it’ll get enacted again soon since Congress has shifted too far to the Right to actually be able to function in a way to help the People. Mass shootings will continue to end up like these as long as people are legally able to buy the weapons with little to no hurdles to go thru.

For the last few years, a lot of people have expressed how much they miss President Obama, and I do miss some aspects of his personality and his presidency: an intelligent, affable, charismatic person who helped make marriage equality an acceptable idea for many, he signed the executive order for DACA. He invested significant political capital to enact the Iran nuclear deal, which staved off the threat of war with Iran. It was historically important to have a black person as president, too. Bin Laden was killed under his watch, so there’s that, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has some good aspects like providing protections for pre-existing conditions. He repealed Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, too, and the stock market was far more stable in 2016 than it was in 2009.

However, there were plenty downsides to his presidency that we should consider. While he technically ended torture as an American policy, he increased drone bombing and bombed seven nations at a time in 2016 alone. He regime changed Libya illegally, leading to the country’s collapse, and attempted to regime change Syria in a fairly drawn-out, agonizing process. The Democratic Party lost Congress and countless state legislatures and governorships to Republicans under his watch, and he failed to leverage his movement for change after his election in 2008. I don’t miss his drive to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a gift to corporations and a slap in the face to workers and democratic processes, either.

Moreover, I don’t miss him going easy on the Bush administration for committing war crimes or his expansion of the surveillance state or setting the precedent for killing American citizens without due process. He waited until the very last minute to intervene at Standing Rock, and he was behind almost 2 million deportations. He used the Espionage Act to crack down on journalists and leakers at an unprecedented level. He also failed to demand at the very least a public option in the ACA after endorsing a single payer system during the 2008 election. He made numerous corporatist executive appointments like Arne Duncan and Larry Summers. He let the big banks off the hook after the financial crisis. He proposed cuts to Social Security, and–relatedly–he had the tendency to negotiate from the center with Republicans who had no desire to negotiate in the first place. And while the stock market might have grown during his presidency, so did wealth inequality. Even though corporate profits soared, poverty barely decreased.

Obama began his presidency with the promise of transformational change. Eight years later, though, one could argue that any number of centrist Democrats could have replicated his legacy. Ultimately, I can understand why people miss him; I prefer Obama to Trump. I know people find his presidency inspiring, and I did, too, for a time. However, I also have no desire to romanticize the Obama administration. We need to look at his legacy soberly. If we do not, we will think that what he achieved is as good as we can get and that a return to Obama-era “normalcy” in 2020 and beyond will set the country on an acceptable track. It will not. America deserves better than the results of the Obama presidency.

lifegod:

Oh My God.

George W. Bush, Freudian Confessions and Foiled Assassinations

George W. Bush, Freudian Confessions and Foiled Assassinations

Death, remarked Gore Vidal about Truman Capote’s passing, was a good career move. The novelist Saki also considered the good qualities of shuffling off the mortal coil. “Waldo,” he writes in “The Feast of Nemesis”, “is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.” But what of those instances when death is foiled, the Grim Reaper cheated?
Former US President George W. Bush has…

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Sweatpants & History | Rosa Parks and Her Lifetime of Activism

Today, on what would have been her 104th birthday, Rosa Parks’ contribution to the Civil Rights Movement is honored—in two states: California and Missouri (Ohio and Oregon observe Rosa Parks Day on December 1, the anniversary of her arrest). Only four out of fifty states have proclaimed a day to honor the woman often dubbed “the first lady of civil rights.” Aside from being a missed opportunity…

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