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  johnpi 10:05 am on December 22, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush (29), Bush Administration, torture (164), US military (60)

  A report on why Bush’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ program failed.

  The section heads pretty well summarize the report.

  I. TORTURE DOES NOT YIELD ACCURATE INTELLIGENCE
  • Military, intelligence experts: Info from enhanced techniques is unreliable
  • The interrogations of Zubaydah and KSM: Enhanced techniques produced no actionable intelligence
  • Enhanced interrogations led to false claims of Iraq/Al Qaeda link

  II. TORTURE MAKES AMERICANS LESS SAFE
  • Enhanced interrogations recruits terrorists
  • Enhanced interrogations puts American soldiers at risk
  • Enhanced interrogations ruin credibility of intelligence agencies
  • Enhanced interrogations strain alliances
  • Interrogations ruined America’s moral authority
  • Enhanced interrogations makes terrorists unprosecutable

  III. HISTORICAL LESSONS CAUTION AGAINST ENHANCED TECHNIQUES
  • Enhanced techniques derived from ineffective communist tactics

   

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  johnpi 8:16 pm on December 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush (29), Bush Administration, bush regime (6), George Bush (3), President Bush (6), right-wing extremists (20), right-wing morons (71)

  Americans judge the Bush decade: ‘Awful’ and ‘not so good.’

  According to the poll, a combined 58% said the decade was either “awful” or “not so good,” 29% said it was fair, and just 12% said it was either “good” or “great.”

   
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  johnpi 7:46 pm on December 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush (29), Bush Administration, bush regime (6), cia (30), color-coded alert system (2), Liars (2), lying liars (57), terror alerts (2)

  A ‘habitual liar’ and con-man convinced the Bush-era CIA that he had developed software that could decipher secret ‘bar codes’ that Al Qaeda embedded in its broadcasts.

  His lies prompted the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level to Orange (high) in December 2003.

   
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  johnpi 12:39 pm on December 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush (29), Bush Administration, bush regime (6), currency (3), dollar (3), economic downturn. (5), economic imperialism (9), economics (48), gulf (7), gulf common currency (2), gulf monetary union (2), gulf states (3), right-wing extremism (10), right-wing extremists (20), right-wing morons (71), US dollar (3)

  Good news: Gulf petro-powers to launch currency in latest threat to dollar hegemony.

  “The Gulf monetary union pact has come into effect,” said Kuwait’s finance minister, Mustafa al-Shamali, speaking at a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait.

  The move will give the hyper-rich club of oil exporters a petro-currency of their own, greatly increasing their influence in the global exchange and capital markets and potentially displacing the US dollar as the pricing currency for oil contracts. Between them they amount to regional superpower with a GDP of $1.2 trillion (£739bn), some 40pc of the world’s proven oil reserves, and financial clout equal to that of China.

  Moves like this signal the death-knell of the kind of gross right-wing ideological economic irresponsibility we saw during the Bush administration. The eventual loss of dollar hegemony will be one of the most significant and far-reaching-into-the-future responses to the Bush era.

   
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  johnpi 10:32 am on December 1, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afghan Taliban (41), al qaeda (93), Bush (29), Bush Administration, cheney (6), dick cheney (9), ISI (14), kunduz, musharraf (5), Pakistan (569), Pakistan army (21), Pakistani government (8), pervez musharraf (10), taliban (260)

  A representative from the US’s lower house of Congress has prompted an outcry from Republicans for saying that the Bush administration ‘intentionally let bin Laden get away’ in order to justify the Iraq war.

  There’s been a lot written about foreign militants escaping from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan in 2001, but less well known are the numbers of fighters who escaped at Kunduz at the request of Pakistan and with permission from Dick Cheney and George Bush. Ahmed Rashid writes about it in ‘Descent into Chaos.’

  For Pakistan, the stalemate in Kunduz was turning into a disaster as hundreds of ISI officers and soldiers from the Frontier Corps aiding the Taliban were trapped there.

  (More …)

   
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  aziz 5:43 am on November 29, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan (396), Bush Administration, osama bin laden (9)

  The evidence is in: the Bush Administration failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001; he was literally “within grasp”.

   
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  buzz 5:13 pm on November 15, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush Administration, Giuliani (2), Global War on Terror (7), Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (2), Republicans (61), war crimes (111), War criminals (10)

  Republicans want this to go away in the worst way. They want to deal with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a dark military tribunal where the reporting is limited and the public won’t be able to consider charges against the Bush Administration. Love the explanation: it “gives an unnecessary advantage to the terrorists.” Such a joke.

  Giuliani Criticizes Terror Trials in New York
  By JOSEPH BERGER

  Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said on Sunday that the Obama administration’s decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks, in a civilian court in Manhattan would unnecessarily cost millions of dollars for security, create legal advantages for the defense and symbolically deny that the United States is at war with terrorism.

  “It gives an unnecessary advantage to the terrorists and why would you want to give an advantage to the terrorists, and it poses risks for New York,” Mr. Giuliani said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He also interviewed on ABC’s “This Week” and “Fox News Sunday.”

  Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced on Friday that the United States would try Mr. Mohammed in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Mr. Holder said that a military commission would try five other detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because they are accused of committing crimes overseas.

  NY Times

   
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  johnpi 7:23 am on February 26, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush Administration, John Yoo (2), torture memo (2), UC Berkeley

  A professor at UC Berkeley has written a letter to the chancellor asking him to fire “torture memo” author John Yoo for professional misconduct and for violating professional ethics for writing the aforementioned document.

  Professor J Bradford Delong makes an incontrovertible case, well worth a read. Nice to see someone defending principles and values (both in the law and the academy) for a change instead of flouting them.

   
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  thabet 5:16 am on August 29, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush Administration, cia (30), Iraq (195), propaganda (47), united states (577)

  Documents posted on at the National Security Archive suggest that “the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials”.

  (Via PR Watch.)

   
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  thabet 5:21 am on August 27, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush Administration, foreign policy (237), russia (44), The New Cold Wart, united states (577)

  Well, at least this is a subject about which the current United States administration should know something.

  God knows, they’ve clearly demonstrated their total ignorance on the Middle East and the ‘Muslim world’.

   
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  aziz 8:30 am on August 21, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bush Administration, civil rights (42), Muslim Advocates (5)

  Muslim Advocates have written a letter to the Attorney General (PDF) of the United States, Michael Mukasey, regarding revisions to the FBI’s “Investigative Guidelines”. MA argues that the revisions are reminiscent of the disgraceful COINTELPRO program in the 60s.

  No, civil liberties in the US are nowhere near as bad as in China or Egypt. But “not as bad as them” isn’t a good enough standard.