Shameful: Obama justice department’s epic FAIL on torture lawyers
Still licensed to practice law: John Yoo (left) and Jay Bybee, authors of the "torture memos"
Apparently, concocting memoranda that provide the fig leaf of legality for war crimes is nothing more than “poor judgment.” It pains me to say this, but shame on the Obama Justice Department. The only reason I can possibly come up with, why a senior lawyer at Justice, Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, would overrule the findings of the Office of Professional Responsibility, which would have found the three lawyers in question, sitting judge Jay Bybee and “unitary executive” inventor John Yoo guilty of professional misconduct, is that maybe the Justice Department fears that such sanction could provide fuel for the torture investigations taking place in Spain?. Who knows, but if that is the case, it wreaks of rank cowardice. Read more
Rubio and the Bushies: Cheney, Matalin and Iraq war spokesman to fundraise
Marco Rubio: a Bush restoration?
Marco Rubio is already the darling of the Club for Growth, the tea party movement, Jeb Bush and the privatize Social Security crowd. Now, he can add to his list of friends: Liz Cheney, Mary Matalin and a whole lot more. It’s like a Bush administration reunion in here, at $500 a plate!
Dick Cheney doubles down: ‘a strong believer in waterboarding’
Dick Cheney wanted the Obama administration to waterboard the undiebomber. He wants to keep waterboarding people at Gitmo. For all we know, he wants to have his former White House colleagues waterboarded too, for defying his evil designs after the 2004 election (when he began to lose more intramural battles than he won, on closing Gitmo, getting out of Iraq, torture, etc.) So the question is, how many times does a guy have to openly admit to war crimes before somebody bothers to prosecute him? Read more
Blair’s promise: U.K. would back U.S. in Saddam overthrow
Tony Blair reportedly promised to back George W. Bush if he decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein … and he apparently made that promise a year before the invasion, at a time when Bush was telling the U.S. media no such decision had been made … the Times of London reports on a series of secret notes that tell the sorry tale of how Great Britain followed Bush and Cheney off a cliff. Read more
Line of the day: ‘bathtub ring’
“Did anybody expect Dick Cheney to become the bathtub ring of the Bush administration?” — Chris Matthews today on his NBC Sunday show.
Closing Gitmo update: some prisoners headed to Illinois
From the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet comes the scoop tonight that the Obama White House has settled on a destination for at least some prisoners from Guantanamo Bay:
WASHINGTON–The White House will announce Tuesday that President Obama will seek to acquire the Thomson Correctional Center in northwestern Illinois to house detainees now held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. Read more
Reracked: Bush/Rumsfeld could have gotten Bin Laden in 2001
… but of course, they let him get away:
A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report issued this weekend says that al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden “was within our grasp” when he was “cornered” in the forbidding mountains of Tora Bora in December, 2001 under intense U.S. bombardment.
… The Senate report says that while bin Laden was writing his last will and testament on December 14, “Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected.” Read more
Remainders: Sarah Palin: like Reagan, only dumber, Rudy won’t be ‘America’s governor,’ and more
Missed this one yesterday in the blizzard of co-dependent, obsessive media coverage of Sarah Palin: she now says “death panels” aren’t really “panels of death,” just like the Soviet Union wasn’t really an evil empire … see how that works?
Marco Rubio (otherwise known as the “Florida Sarah Palin”) has some thoughts on Reagan, too, only his weren’t so flattering to the Gipper when it comes to immigration. Andrew Sullivan, however, agrees with a point Rubio surely would have run, screaming, from the room, had he known he was making it: much of Reagan’s legacy must be repudiated in order to get to today’s GOP.
Meanwhile, as a new DKos poll shows him ahead of Rubio by a mere 10 points, Charlie Crist will next try to get right with the jihadis by announcing that he now believes the earth is 6,000 years old, and man lived side-by-side with the dinosaurs. Okay, I made that last part up, but the poll is real. (Apparently, it contains no good news for Kendrick Meek, however, who barely registers unless it’s a three-way race.) Well, if Charlie needs some advice, here’s some from a veteran political reporter at the St. Pete Times.
Over to Newsweek, where Michael Isikoff reports that Judge Jay Bybee, author of the infamous “torture memo,” is lawyering up, in anticipation of a possible impeachment. An interesting tidbit in the piece: Isikoff reports that when the initial draft report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility emerged during the waning days of the Bush administration, then-Attorney General Mukasey not only killed it, he ordered it to be sent to the targets, including Bybee and John Yoo. Talk about not knowing which team you’re supposed to be playing for, Mr. then-”attorney for the people of the United States …”
Also at Newsweek: have we seen the last of the Ayatollahs of Iran? If so, it will apparently be the fault of the current one, Mr. Khameini.
Over to ABC News, which reports that finally, Rudy Giuliani has figured out that New Yorkers can’t stand him, and wouldn’t want him as their governor… or something like that. Bottom line: he would have had the floor mopped with his balding head by Andrew Cuomo, so he’s eyeing a race against the less flashy Kirsten Gillibrand instead. Good luck with that, ya jerk.
9/11 suspects to finally be tried
Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, accused 9/11 ringleader, as he reportedly looks now. (AP)
After seven years of the Bush administration arresting paint ball afficionadoes, wayward gang members, and oddly religioned karate-men, we’re finally going to see justice done to some of the people actually involved in 9/11. And isn’t that a change of pace… Read more
Burning questions: since the Bush administration spying on us anyway, why didn’t they catch Nidal Hasan?
The right is itching to blame the Fort Hood massacre on Barack Obama. They want to charge that in the politically-correct Age of O-quarious, even the United States Army is too timid to confront an openly-declared Islamist terrorist in their midst, or even to call him such by name. They are dying to say that Obama and his Pentagon should have been alerted by the Obama FBI about the threat that Nidal Hasan posed to his fellow soldiers. After all … hadn’t he had stated his Islamist views and been in contact al-Qaida…!!! …
… in 2007 and 2008 … When George W. Bush was still president. Read more
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