Daily Funny

London Bomb--What a Crock of Crap!!

Larry Johnson, former CIA and deputy director of the office of counterterrorism at the State Dept. weighs in on the latest "thwarted" attack in London:

"You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incendiary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal. " (cont.)

Supreme Court Reverses Course, Agrees To Review Guantanamo Habeas Corpus Issue

AP:
WASHINGTON — Rejecting Bush administration arguments, the Supreme Court reversed course and agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees can use the civilian court system to challenge their indefinite confinement.

The administration argues that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases.

The justices took the action without comment along with other end-of-term orders. In April, the court turned down an identical request, although several justices indicated they could be persuaded otherwise.

Ex-Reagan official: Impeach Cheney for 'multiple crimes'

Rawstory:
Bruce Fein, who served as the Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, in a scathing editorial today called for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III," he writes.

Abu Ghraib Cover-up About to Explode

The Hill:
Gen. Antonio Taguba is one of America’s most respected senior officers, was put in charge of the Abu Ghraib investigation, and has now leveled a series of powerful public charges that will soon blow this case sky-high.

Gen. Taguba went public early this week in long on-the-record interviews with Sy Hersh reported in his New Yorker piece now on newsstands.

Among other things, Taguba says:
1. He was ordered not to investigate higher-ups in the chain of command, which meansthere was (is) a cover-up protecting the highest-ranking Bush administration officials who might have criminal liability.
2. Early in his investigation he was threatened with career retribution if he dared to seek the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
3. After his investigation he was punished by being forced into early retirement. (cont.)

Bin Laden may have helped family flee US

What's not being reported in the U.S. Media

Australia's Herald Sun:
OSAMA bin Laden may have chartered a plane that carried his family members and Saudi nationals out of the US after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI says.

The papers, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, were made public by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based group that investigates government corruption.

Update: White House White House shoots down Guantanamo report

MSNBC:

WASHINGTON - The White House on Thursday denied a report that top administration officials were expected to meet Friday to discuss closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere.

"No decisions on the future of Guantanamo Bay are imminent, and there will not be a White House meeting tomorrow," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in response to a report by the Associated Press.

Cheney tried to nix agency targeting him

NY Times:

For four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has resisted routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information, and when the National Archives unit that monitors classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president’s office suggested abolishing the oversight unit, according to documents released yesterday by a Democratic congressman.

And on to the utterly absurd:

Rawstory:

Cheney tells agency that Vice President's office is not part of the executive branch
The Office of Vice President Dick Cheney told an agency within the National Archives that for purposes of securing classified information, the Vice President's office is not an 'entity within the executive branch' according to a letter released Thursday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

So which branch of our government IS Cheney a part of? The Unitary Executive Branch?? Perhaps it might do him some good to read the Constitution instead of shredding it.

Rumsfeld Lied to Congress About Torture

AFP:

A general who investigated US troops sexually humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison said in a report out Saturday that top Pentagon officials denied knowledge of lurid photographs of the acts.

Army Major General Antonio Taguba said he met with then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials and described to them some of the contents of a report he had prepared on the notorious prison.

But Rumsfeld testified before Congress the following day that he had no idea of the extent of the abuse, Taguba told the New Yorker magazine in an interview.

The Myth of the Conservative movement

C&L:

This study shows that Progressive ideas govern much better.

For anyone interested in where the American public really stands on the big issues that distinguish progressives from conservatives — including the issues at the forefront of today’s political debates — “The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth” offers hard facts and analysis based on decades of data from some of the nation’s most respected and nonpartisan public opinion researchers….read on

Not that you didn’t already know it. Here’s the pdf…

Brownback wants to prevent rape victims from having abortions

C&L:
Isn’t it amazing how the party that tells you that you shouldn’t trust the government to make decisions for you has absolutely no problem allowing the government to make decisions over women’s bodies?

Court To Bush Admin: Military Can't "Seize And Indefinitely Detain" Civilians

Huffingtonpost:
RICHMOND, Va. — A divided panel from a conservative federal appeals court harshly rebuked the Bush administration's anti-terrorism strategy Monday, ruling that U.S. residents cannot be locked up indefinitely as "enemy combatants" without being charged.

The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the government should charge Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident and the only suspected enemy combatant on American soil, or release him from military custody.

"Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them 'enemy combatants,'" the court said.

Nuremberg prosecutor says Guantanamo trials unfair

Reuters:
MIAMI, June 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

Blackwater-backed Torture Flights Caught in the UK

Alternet:
The most secret and powerful mercenary firm in America has been bankrolling planes to fly terrorism suspects to secret prisons.

Blackwater USA, the nefarious sounding and behaving contracting company, whose reputation for treachery rivals Halburton's, has been linked to a plane being used to shuttle "terror suspects" to secret prisons in Poland and Romania. These "torture flights" have been roundly condemned by human rights groups.
The Blackwater connection has come to light because of a plane spotted landing in the UK this past weekend. Inside the supposedly civilian plane were four armed US security policemen.

Rights Groups List 39 Disappeared In War On Terror

Any more questions about whether Bush is a war criminal?

Reuters:
Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people.

Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people they said were believed to have been held in U.S. custody and "disappeared."

The groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they filed a U.S. federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the 39 people it terms "ghost prisoners" in the U.S. "war on terror."

"Since the end of Latin America's dirty wars, the world has rejected the use of 'disappearances' as a fundamental violation of international law," Professor Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University's School of Law said in a statement.

The report said suspects' relatives, including children as young as seven, had been held in secret detention on occasion.

Experts cast doubt on credibility of JFK terror plot

Brisbane Times:
An alleged plot to blow up fuel tanks and pipelines at New York's JFK airport had little chance of success, according to safety experts, who have questioned whether the plot ever posed a real threat.

US authorities said Saturday they had averted an attack that could have resulted in "unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction," and charged four alleged Islamic radicals with conspiracy to cause an explosion at the airport.

But according to the experts, it would have been next to impossible to cause an explosion in the jet fuel tanks and pipeline. Furthermore, the plotters seem to have lacked the explosives and financial backing to carry out the attack.

Olbermann: The Nexus Of Politics And Terror

C&L:
On Monday night's "Countdown" Keith Olbermann updates his disturbing timeline of how the Bush Administration has strategically used terrorism and fear to counter bad publicity, starting in 2002 all the way up to the most recent terrorist plot to blow up JFK airport. This is a long segment so we've broken it down into two files. This is stunning, and dramatic analysis, make sure to watch both parts.

You can watch the video here.

JFK Plot More Talk Than Action- Is this conveniently timed fear mongering?

This flimsy "terror plot" seems to have been revealed at a very convenient time for the Bush Administration, given the sentencing of Scooter Libby this week. This isn't the first time we've seen this happen. I'll be posting more on this issue.

NY Times:
The plot as painted by law enforcement officials was cataclysmic: A home-grown Islamic terrorist had in mind detonating fuel storage tanks and pipelines and setting fire to Kennedy International Airport, not to mention a substantial swath of Queens.

But the criminal complaint filed by the federal authorities against the four defendants in the case — one of them, Abdel Nur, remained at large yesterday — suggests a less than mature terror plan, a proposed effort longer on evil intent than on operational capability.

(Ms. Mauskopf noted in her news release that the “public was never at risk” and told reporters that law enforcement “had stopped this plot long before it ever had a chance to be carried out.”)

At its heart was a 63-year-old retired airport cargo worker, Russell M. Defreitas, who the complaint says talked of his dreams of inflicting massive harm, but who appeared to possess little money, uncertain training and no known background in planning a terror attack.

Libby sentenced to 30 months in prison

AP:
Cheney’s former chief of staff was found guilty of lying, obstructing probe

WASHINGTON - Former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was sentenced to 2½ years in prison Tuesday for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation.
Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, stood calmly before a packed courtroom as a federal judge said the evidence overwhelmingly proved his guilt.

Senate Panel Questions C.I.A. Detentions

NY Times:
The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday questioned the continuing value of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program for terrorism suspects, suggesting that international condemnation and the obstacles it has created to criminal prosecution may outweigh its worth in gathering information.

Sunnis Revolt Against al-Qaida in Iraq

Salon:
U.S. troops battled al-Qaida in west Baghdad on Thursday after Sunni Arab residents challenged the militants and called for American help to end furious gunfire that kept students from final exams and forced people in the neighborhood to huddle indoors.

The fight reflects a trend that U.S. and Iraqi officials have been trumpeting recently to the west in Anbar province, once considered the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. Many Sunni tribes in the province have banded together to fight al-Qaida, claiming the terrorist group is more dangerous than American forces. (cont.)