Longue vie au Roi...President !! (Artwork: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE's/flickr)

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Will You Love Every Future President?

by David Swanson
October 15, 2009

Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Some of the new powers that those two stole from Congress, the courts, the states, and us the people are being abused less severely in this new age of Obama; others, more so; but far more crucially, in a pattern followed by recent presidencies, all are being maintained, if not expanded, and thus more firmly cemented into place for future presidents to use. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you are likely to strongly oppose some major decisions of some future presidents. So it shouldn’t be hard to envision some pretty undesirable consequences that might flow from presidential power that increasingly approaches the absolute. Read the full story

Torturas, programas secretos e ilegalidades, forman parte indisoluble de sus “tareas”

por Marta G. Sojo (inter@bohemia.co.cu)
16 de octubre de 2009

Hay comentarios históricos de que nunca la Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA) olió bien. No pocos se preguntan por qué tanta “novedosa” sorpresa entre algunos personajes, si es evidente que las prácticas de esta entidad nunca han sido ortodoxas, y a cada rato salen a relucir las barbaridades en las que se ha visto envuelta más de una vez.

Las turbulencias en la actualidad siguen siendo más de lo mismo. Según testimonios recientes, se supo de la existencia de un programa ultrasecreto de espionaje del cual ni el propio actual director, León Panetta, había sido informado cuando asumió el cargo.

El programa no se había activado, aunque fue ordenado después de los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001, y pasó a las sombras a petición del ex vicepresidente Dick Cheney. Tan oculto estaba que tampoco lo conocían los congresistas federales encargados en el Capitolio de los asuntos de inteligencia. Read the full story

por Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy
22 de septiembre, 2009

Si el famoso poeta italiano Dante Alighieri hubiera vivido en nuestros tiempos, no hubiera dudado un ápice en incluir a la Central de Inteligencia de los Estados Unidos en cualquiera de sus círculos del Infierno. Dentro de éstos hubieran tenido cabida, sin lugar a dudas, todos los directores de esta agencia gubernamental desde Allan Dulles hasta su actual director, Leon Panneta. Read the full story

by Ray McGovern
September 19, 2009

For the CIA supervisors and operatives responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost; that is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder mean it when they say no one is above the law – and if they don’t fall victim to brazen intimidation.

Unable to prevent Holder from starting an investigation of torture and other war crimes that implicate CIA officials past and present, those same CIA officials, together with what those in the intelligence trade call “agents of influence” in the media, are pulling out all the stops to quash the Justice Department’s preliminary investigation. Read the full story

Should Judge Laurence Silberman have recused himself from a case involving alleged torture for which his buddies were ultimately responsible?

by Jeremy Scahill
September 14, 2009

On September 11, the US appeals court for the District of Columbia announced in a 2-1 decision that it was throwing out a lawsuit against CACI International and L-3 Communications Titan unit, which are being sued by Iraqi civilians for their alleged role in the torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The companies provided interrogators at the prison at the height of the abuses there. The suit alleges that employees of the companies conspired with U.S. Army reservist Charles Graner, who was convicted of prisoner abuse on January 14, 2005 and is currently serving 10 years at Fort Leavenworth, and others to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Several of the plaintiffs are Iraqis whose torture was depicted in graphic photos revealed over the past several years. Read the full story

by Robert Parry
September 8, 2009

Lost amid the attention given George W. Bush’s “war on terror” torture policies was the CIA’s cryptic admission that it also engaged in interrogation abuses during Ronald Reagan’s anti-leftist wars in Central America, another era of torture and extra-judicial killings.

The 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, released last month, referenced as “background” to the Bush-era abuses the spy agency’s “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.” The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching those techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.” Read the full story

by Mark Mazzetti
September 1, 2009

WASHINGTON – The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to make public hundreds of pages of internal documents about the agency’s defunct detention and interrogation program, saying such disclosures would jeopardize national security by revealing classified intelligence sources and operations.

The C.I.A.’s argument to withhold the material, laid out Monday in a declaration to a federal court in New York, comes a week after the Obama administration declassified documents about abuses in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons and the Justice Department began investigating the actions of C.I.A. operatives. Read the full story

A response to Cheney’s pro-torture media blitz.

by Jeremy Scahill
August 31, 2009

First of all, Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised it to criticize the Bush administration’s lie-filled, one-way propaganda train to the Iraq war). Read the full story

by Scott Horton
August 25, 2009

You can catch my review of the CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s report on BBC’s “The World” or on MSNBC’s Live with Carlos Watson today at 11 ET. Here, in the meantime, are seven points that I draw from it:

1.The worst is yet to come. Yesterday the CIA released a fresh copy of the report with roughly half of the “case study” discussion now unmasked. But context and placement suggest that the material that remains concealed contains some of the worst discussion of abuse in the report. The heavy redactions start around page 25, and the redactions cover discussion of the origins of the program and the approval process, as well as the discussion of specific prisoners, notably Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. Although cases in which the guidelines provided by the Justice Department were exceeded have been discussed, it’s likely the case that the still blacked-out passages cover instances where Justice gave a green light but the conduct was so gruesome that CIA wants to keep it under wraps. That means we haven’t heard the last of the Helgerson report, and further disclosures are likely. Read the full story

by Ray McGovern
August 20, 2009

Hats off to Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times for reporting that it was after CIA Director Leon Panetta’s holdover lieutenants finally told him that, under President Bush, they had farmed out assassinations to their Blackwater subsidiary, that he abruptly stopped the project and told Congress. Read the full story