What a day for news

The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday gutted most of what remains of the landmark Voting Rights Act. The court's decision, while leaving some protections involving redistricting in place, left close to a dead letter the law once hailed as the most effective civil rights legislation in the nation's history.

The 6-3 vote was along ideological lines, with Justice Samuel Alito writing the decision for the court's conservative majority, and the liberals in angry dissent.

At issue in the case were two Arizona laws: one banned the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver, and the other threw out any ballots cast in the wrong precinct. A federal appeals court struck down both provisions, ruling that they had an unequal impact on minority voters and that there was no evidence of fraud that would have justified their use.

But on Thursday, the Supreme Court reinstated the state laws, declaring that unequal impact on minorities in this context was relatively minor, that other states have similar laws and that states don't have to wait for fraud to occur before enacting laws to prevent it.

  NPR

The MAGA court in action.

Just because voting may be "inconvenient for some," Alito wrote, doesn't mean that access to voting is unequal. [...] And "the mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote."

That's precisely what it means.

[T]he U.S. Justice Department, in a statement, said: "The department remains strongly committed to challenging discriminatory election laws and will continue to use every legal tool available to protect all qualified Americans seeking to participate in the electoral process. The department urges Congress to enact additional legislation to provide more effective protection for every American's right to vote."

Thye'll have to do it without Republicans.

Thursday's decision complicates the department's decision to sue the state of Georgia over its new voting law, alleging that the measure is intended to restrict ballot access to Black voters.

"Complicates."

In response to the SCOTUS voting decision, House Judiciary members Nadler and Cohen announce the Committee will "expeditiously complete its work on an updated John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and move to bring legislation to the House floor as quickly as possible." Source

Indiscreet comments made by an Exxon Mobil lobbyist to undercover activists may figure prominently in upcoming congressional hearings about the role of oil companies in the battle against climate change.

Video clips released by the Greenpeace investigation project Unearthed show Keith McCoy, the oil giant's senior director for federal relations, talking frankly about Exxon Mobil's lobbying strategies. Channel 4 from the United Kingdom first reported the comments.

[...]

"Joe Manchin, I talk to his office every week," McCoy bragged to the interviewer. He called the Democratic senator from West Virginia a "kingmaker" and discussed how "on the Democrat side we look for the moderates on these issues" in their efforts to stop policies that could hurt the company's business.

  NPR

Nicely calling out Joe Manchin there.

Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, says he will hold a hearing this fall about "climate disinformation & the coordinated attack on scientific truth among polluters and their lobbyists."

Khanna, who chairs the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on the Environment, says he will ask the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron and other fossil fuel companies to testify.

It should be an interesting hearing. Among McCoy's comments to the undercover activists, he said Exxon Mobil has a playbook for dealing with hearings like what Khanna plans. He said they usually send trade group representatives to be "the whipping boy."

Khanna says he will subpoena executives if they refuse to appear themselves.

[...]

Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods said in a statement that McCoy's comments don't represent his company's views.

Sure.

On LinkedIn, McCoy wrote, "I am deeply embarrassed by my comments and that I allowed myself to fall for Greenpeace's deception. My statements clearly do not represent ExxonMobil's positions on important public policy issues."

McCoy's profile on the site showed he was still employed at the company as of Thursday morning.

Hahaha. Ask again tomorrow.

Trump's family business and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have been charged by the Manhattan district attorney's office in a case involving alleged tax-related crimes.

[...]

The investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. began in 2018 around the time Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges related to payments of hush money.

[...]

New York state Attorney General Letitia James' office launched its own probe in 2019.

[...]

In a statement released in May, Trump said the New York-based investigations were part of a "Witch Hunt," adding, with a reference to how his presidential campaign started in 2015: "It began the day I came down the escalator in Trump Tower, and it's never stopped."

  NPR

It SHOULD have started long before that day.

The indictment of Allen Weisselberg and the Trump Organization is more sweeping than anticipated, indicate other execs are involved and makes a possible prison sentence a real fear for Weisselberg. Source

Also...

Nancy Pelosi gave Liz Cheney a seat on the January 6 insurrection investigating committee.  That should get her some more MAGA death threats. She's not afraid though. She accepted this offer after McCarthy threatened to strip anyone of their committee assignments if they agreed to serve on the commission.

And Adam Kinzinger appears to care even less. (Although he was not invited.)

“Who gives a sh*t?” @RepKinzinger tells reporters on @GOPLeader’s threat to remove committee assignments for any GOP House member who joined Jan 6 Select Committee. Source

And the old war criminal Donald Rumsfeld has gone to meet his maker in Hell.

Is He Still Around?

And did he rip this off from Churchill?



Clever.



Ha.



Oh, clever.



Brilliant.

Senile Old People Lose Their Filters

A new biography of the 41st president – Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush – reveals that Bush Sr held Cheney and Rumsfeld responsible for the hawkish stance that “hurt” his son’s administration, Fox News reported on Wednesday.

  Guardian

I seem to recall that actually, it was his own son who loudly pouted that Saddam Hussein "tried to kill my dad!" as part of his rationale for invading Iraq.  So, while Cheney and Rumsfeld certainly deserve a goodly portion, I don't think all the blame can be put on those two evil clowns.

The book, by Jon Meacham, is based on audio diaries that Bush recorded during his time in the White House, as well as interviews with the former president and his wife, Barbara.

[...]

“[Cheney's] reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East,” Bush told Meacham in the book, which is due to be published next week.

What? Dick Cheney knuckled under to "hard-charging guys"? He was a dove before that? Sure, Poppy. Sure.

“I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there – some of it his [Bush Jr], maybe, and some of it the people around him. Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.”

He added that George W Bush’s infamous state of the union address in 2002, in which the then president warned of an “axis of evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, “might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything”.

[...]

“He’s my son, he did his best and I’m for him. It’s that simple an equation.”

Simple explains a lot of things about W, but “might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything” is quite a torturous dismissal of a world-changing moment.

Rumsfeld, who was Bush Jr’s secretary of defense for most of his two terms, has so far not commented on the criticisms directed at him by the 41st president, who in the book calls him “an arrogant fellow”, adding: “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president.

Who was just a simple man who did his best.

And look at the state of the world now.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Mystery of Rumsfeld's Behavior Solved

Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Cheney wrote this memo to Staff Secretary Jim Connor in October 1975, wanting to know why the coffee bill for Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld’s office had been so high the previous month. Connor’s handwritten note succinctly sums up why the bill was over $100: “They are drinking too much coffee and have too many people drinking it!”

  Today's Document

I wonder how much of the coffee Cheney himself drank.  I wonder whether Derr Rumsfiend was called on this. Was his coffee consumption curtailed? Inquiring minds want to know.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Irony Is Dead

[James] Mitchell and [Bruce] Jessen were two former U.S. military psychologists contracted by the CIA to design, develop, and run the agency’s detention, rendition, and interrogation operations. As psychologists in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, the two men had devoted their careers to training U.S. troops to resist abusive treatment in case of capture by governments that violate the Geneva Conventions.

  ACLU

If you have the stomach for it, read the article for details of the torture of one detinee who was held without charge for years, tortured and finally released once he'd been "broken", and the story of how these two criminals aided the US military and CIA's detainee program.

It's well and good that these men should be tried for criminal behavior, but so should the CIA officials who contracted them, and the Bush administration officials who signed off on the use of torture after 9/11 and the rejection of the Geneva Conventions.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 4/22/2016:  A judge has granted three detainees the right to sue these sick quacks.

They Hate Us for Our Freedoms

Glenn Greenwald has a couple of mentions on his Twitter account this morning about a September 2004 disregarded report of a task force created by Donald Rumsfeld to understand our situation post-9/11 vis-à-vis the Musliim world and our “interventions” therein. Here are some excerpts of that unclassified report:

Americans believe that while the U.S. necessarily shapes foreign policies to support our national interests, those same interests are not necessarily in opposition to the interests of other nations and cultures. To the contrary, Americans are convinced that the U.S. is a benevolent “super power” that elevates values emphasizing freedom and prosperity as at the core of its own national interest. Thus, for Americans, “U.S. values” are in reality “world values” — exemplified by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the 1975 Helsinki Accords — so deep down we assume that everyone should naturally support our policies.

Yet the world of Islam — by overwhelming majorities at this time — sees things differently. Muslims see American policies as inimical to their values, American rhetoric about freedom and democracy as hypocritical, and American actions as deeply threatening.

In other words, they do not hate us for our values, but because of our policies.

  FAS

Oh, really? Is that the message Der Rumsfeld tried to get across to the American public?

[A] similar series of questions showed even more favorable opinion ratios in favor of U.S. culture and its values — in 2002. Thus it seems that in two years the Jihadi message — that strongly attacks American values — is being accepted by more moderate and non-violent Muslims. This in turn implies that negative opinion of the U.S. has not yet bottomed-out, but is in fact continuing to move dynamically. [...] In Saudi Arabia, a large majority believes that the U.S. seeks to “weaken” and “dominate” Islam itself — in other words, Americans have become the enemy. It is noteworthy that opinion is hardest over against America in precisely those places ruled by what Muslims call “apostates” and tyrants — the tyrants we support. This should give us pause. [...] Furthermore, if regular Muslims are indeed moving to hard “opposition” to the U.S. then we have only so much time to open such a channel before the possibility is closed for the duration of this war.

Yeah. I think we missed it. On purpose, it appears.

The complete report, with recommendations, is here.

This report is a product of the Defense Science Board (DSB). The DSB is a Federal Advisory Committee established to provide independent advice to the Secretary of Defense. Statements, opinions, conclusions , and recommendations in this report do not necessarily represent the official position of the Department of Defense.

No shit.

We Tortured Killed Some Folks

Three “suicides” [of Guantanamo prisoners] on June 10, 2006  “incurred the wrath of then Guantanamo commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., who announced that the suicides were ‘not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare against us.’ In a similar spirit, Colleen Graffy, deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC that the suicides ‘certainly (are) a good PR move to draw attention.’”

The reactions of Harris and Graffy, [...] were indictment enough of the unconscionably coarse attitude of senior U.S. government representatives regarding human life. But now there is the possibility that they were only spouting a cover story for even a worse scenario, a triple homicide about which they may well have been kept in the dark.

[...]

“It is still not 100-percent clear exactly how the three died and who was present at the time. However, it is abundantly clear that the Government’s claims concerning their deaths are false, fabricated to cover up what actually transpired."

[...]

The records “reveal that the three died not from strangulation (as would be the case in a hanging) but from asphyxiation resulting from having cloth stuffed down their throats — precisely the same kind of cloth, it turns out, that was used by a similar interrogation team around the same time at the Charleston Brig, and which has been labeled by a University of California study as ‘dryboarding,’” Horton wrote in an email.

[...]

“Penny Lane was being used by an interrogation unit of the CIA up until approximately the time of the deaths, and it was, strictly speaking, a CIA facility. Under the terms of a Special-Access Program (SAP), neither the camp commander nor the commander of Joint Task Force, Guantanamo were to have any knowledge of this program and what went on in connection with it. The program reported to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally, as well as to an official at the White House’s National Security Council.

  Ray McGovern: Consortium News

And someone may have been getting too close to that fact when it was decided Rumsfiend needed to resign. It happened shortly before he left.

The interminable delays [in releasing the Senate report on torture] can be more readily understood, once you realize that the Senate report, if it is halfway honest, must include evidence on CIA-sponsored homicide as well as torture, which might put Obama back on the spot regarding his pious assertions that “no one is above the law.” He has shown no appetite to discharge his duty if it risks getting crosswise with his spies.

I doubt anyone in Washington wants to get crosswise with the spies.

I was having trouble wrapping my mind around the notion that [my former colleagues at] the CIA had been given official sanction to murder. And inured as I am now to such indignities, I still shudder at the prospect that President Obama will, a year or two from now, explain it all with a nonchalant riff on his earlier “We tortured some folks” — substituting “killed” for “tortured.”

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

Ray McGovern Interview

This is a long interview, but every piece of information is important and edifying. You can safely skip the first ten minutes, which is essentially the all-too-self-aggrandizing interviewer, Brian Rose, well, self aggrandizing.



Here are some of the topics covered: CIA, US foreign policy, terrorism, US intelligence agencies, Viet Nam, Donald Rumsfeld, George HW Bush, George W Bush, Barack Obama, Ukraine, Middle East, al Qaeda, ISI, political leaks, Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Kruschev, Cold War, Europe, Edward Snowden, Gulf Wars, truth & integrity, journalism, torture, US Constitution, political corruption, NATO,

American Justice

[Y]esterday in American justice, a three-judge panel of a federal appellate court in Virginia upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit brought against Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush officials by Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen who was imprisoned for almost three years without charges or even a lawyer and was systematically tortured to the point of permanent mental incapacitation. Padilla sued the former Defense Secretary on the ground that he had authorized Padilla’s illegal imprisonment and torture. The Obama DOJ vigorously defended Rumsfeld, arguing (a) that Rumsfeld is entitled to immunity on the ground that he had reason to believe his acts were legal and (b) an American citizen has no right to sue a government official for the treatment he receives as a designated “enemy combatant” — even if the treatment in question is torture and prolonged imprisonment without charges.

  Glenn Greenwald

Two unconscionable and illegal acts.

Even as [terror victims aka enemy combatants] have been able to pursue claims against foreign officials in countries around the world, often successfully, the Bush and Obama DOJs have insisted, and courts have agreed, that they have no right even to be heard in an American court against the country and its officials most responsible for their (often savage) mistreatment — even if everyone acknowledges that they were completely innocent.

[...]

Regarding this heinous story about a campaign manager of a Democratic House candidate in Arkansas coming home to find his child’s cat murdered with the word “LIBERAL” scrawled on the cat’s corpse, a picture of which made its way to the Internet to highlight how horrible a crime it was, one commenter applied the Obama mentality as follows: “We should look forward, not back on this cat killing. But perhaps whoever released that photo should be prosecuted.” And about the Kirakou case, John Cole sarcastically celebrated: “At Long Last, Someone Will Face a Waterboarding Related Prosecution, and then added: “He’s being prosecuted for blabbing about what happened- not the actual crime itself.”

[...]

Although the DOJ ultimately decided yesterday against indictments of the lawyers in the case who [attempted to determine which CIA agents actually tortured Gitmo prisoners], the very fact that the DOJ criminally investigated them at all is self-evidently dangerous. About that investigation, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero told Savage that “it — and the Obama-era leak investigations more broadly — had had a ‘chilling effect on defense counsel, government whistle-blowers, and journalists’.” That, of course, is exactly its purpose.

[...]

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

[...]

When the purpose of American justice is to shield those who with the greatest power who commit the most egregious crimes, while severely punishing those who talk publicly about those crimes, it’s hard to imagine how it can get much more degraded or corrupted than that.

It’s long past time to rip those blindfolds off of the Lady Justice statues.