Exclusive: Scapegoating the whistleblower!

Exclusive: Scapegoating the Whistleblower! 

June 26, 2014 5:00AM ET | Al Jazeera America | by Jason Leopold @JasonLeopold

How a former CIA officer’s efforts to get Congress to investigate the rendition and torture of a CIA captive failed!

CIA operative Sabrina De Sousa, who has been convicted in absentia in Italy of the kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in Milan in 2003. De Sousa says she did not know about the incident, and even if she did, she says she should be given immunity because she was a diplomat.

Barbara L. Salisbury / MCT / Landov

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama made many promises. One notable pledge was that, as president, he would strengthen whistleblower-protection laws to make it easier for federal employees to report waste, fraud and abuse in government.
“Often the best source of information … is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out,” Obama said, in a campaign fact sheet entitled “The Change We Need in Washington.” “We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance.”
Since then, Obama has signed an executive order and a bill strengthening the rights of whistleblowers. But the new law does not provide the same protections to government employees who work in the intelligence community and want to report wrongdoing. Former undercover CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa found that out the hard way.
In 2005, De Sousa, who was officially listed as a State Department diplomat assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Milan, was implicated in the rendition of a radical Egyptian cleric in Italy named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, better known as Abu Omar. Italy had granted him political asylum in 2001 after the Egyptian government alleged that he was part of a terrorist group. While in Italy, Abu Omar spoke out publicly and vehemently against U.S. military action in Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion. Italy responded by placing him under surveillance.

Abu Omar at an Amnesty International press conference in 2007. He was kidnapped in Milan in February 2003 and taken to a high-security prison outside Cairo, where, he says, he was subjected to torture.

Khaled Desouki / AFP / Getty Images

On Feb. 17, 2003, while walking to his local mosque, Abu Omar was approached by an Italian police officer and longtime CIA informant named Luciano Ludwig Pironi, who asked to see his passport. Moments later, a white van pulled up and Abu Omar was shoved inside. He was then flown to Egypt, where, he said, he was subjected to brutal torture techniques, such as electric shocks, for four years. When Italian authorities tried to locate Abu Omar, U.S. officials told them he had disappeared into the Balkans.
Italy launched an investigation into Abu Omar’s abduction in 2005, and in 2007 more than two dozen Americans suspected of being involved in the rendition, including De Sousa, who Italian law enforcement officials alleged was one of the masterminds of the operation, were indicted. Nineteen of the Americans whom Italy indicted and convicted, De Sousa says, were not working under their true identities. This meant she was one of the few “real” operatives accountable for the rendition.
But De Sousa insists she never played an active role in the execution of the rendition. She says she worked as a translator between the CIA rendition team and the Italian military-intelligence-and-security service, which was involved in the early stages of planning the rendition. In November 2009, she was sentenced in absentia to a five-year prison term in Italy.
Abu Omar was released from detention in Egypt in 2007 and remains there with his family. He has filed a civil claim against De Sousa. Last year, Italy convicted him in absentia on terrorism charges in what appears to be an attempt to cover up the Italian government’s own role in his rendition.
Last year, for the first time, De Sousa revealed that she was a CIA operative working for the National Clandestine Service (NCS). For nearly a decade, she had been working behind-the-scenes firing off letters to members of Congress and executive branch officials, informing them that the U.S. violated international laws when the CIA decided to kidnap Abu Omar.
De Sousa has never publicly discussed all the efforts she undertook to alert government officials and lawmakers that the Abu Omar’s kidnapping was a “colossal mistake” and convince them to investigate her claims of wrongdoing, which implicate top CIA officials. She told Al Jazeera that she first contacted top Bush administration officials, but received no response. In 2009, hoping the response would be different under Obama, she disclosed to then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton what she says are troubling details about her treatment by the U.S. government in the aftermath of her whistleblowing. But, like the Bush administration officials before them, they also ignored her pleas, De Sousa says, and the CIA turned her into a “scapegoat” while the executive branch looked away.

Blowing the whistle -

Though she was aware of the plans to capture Abu Omar, De Sousa says, she was eventually “cut out” because she did not get along with the CIA station chief in Milan, Robert Lady, and that on the day of the operation she was skiing with her family.
There was nothing definitive in the classified cables, De Sousa says, about the threat the CIA said Abu Omar posed to national security as the rendition operation was being planned. “The cable was full of ‘suspected of,’ ‘alleged to.’ Nothing that said ‘he was responsible for.’ Nothing definitive,” De Sousa says.
De Sousa describes her CIA colleagues in Rome and Cairo as acting like keystone cops in the aftermath of Abu Omar’s rendition, trying to figure out who had the evidence against him to present to Egypt so he could be prosecuted.
“The CIA station chief in Cairo said to Jeffrey Castelli [CIA station chief in Rome] ‘Where’s the evidence?’ Castelli said, ‘I thought you had the information.’ And Cairo said, ‘We don’t have it. We thought you had it.’ Castelli says, ‘We don’t have it.’ Then Cairo says, “We issued this arrest warrant on your behalf. So where is the evidence?" The blunder ultimately forced Egypt to set Abu Omar free.
“This is exactly when the whole cover-up started,” she says. “It turns out there was a big miscommunication between Cairo Station and Rome Station. There wasn’t any prosecutable evidence against Abu Omar. It’s why he was never picked up by the Italians. But Castelli decided he wanted a rendition and he got one.”
De Sousa alleges that Castelli was gunning for a promotion to a coveted CIA position in New York City and to land it someone had to be subjected to extraordinary rendition. “Who could he pick out from this target list of 10 people he had. Abu Omar because it was the easiest. Why was it the easiest? Because he was already under surveillance by the Italians and they were sharing information [with the CIA],” De Sousa says.
Castelli, who now works at a private security firm in Arlington, Virginia, called Endgame, did not respond to requests for comment.
“Abu Omar was a nobody,” De Sousa says. “The renditions are meant for imminent, very dangerous threats and [are meant to be used in]countries that are incapable of laws that would allow them to pick up people who pose threats to national security. They’re not meant for a country like Italy already following the guy around.”
De Sousa says that, based on her reading of classified CIA cables, there were “four people responsible for this thing”: Castelli; a shadowy figure identified as “Agent X,” whom De Sousa would not discuss further and who told Lady to make sure the Abu Omar rendition was executed; Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA covert operations in Europe; and Pironi, the CIA informant and Italian police officer.
But De Sousa says Italy demanded that people be held accountable for the embarrassing mistake and the CIA chose her and several of her colleagues. “Despite the circumstantial charges against me, the CIA scapegoated me to deflect attention from those who authorized the rendition and also prevent further investigations into the operation,” De Sousa says. “Also, I believe I was left out of the initial immunity deal [Italy agreed to for other, more senior officers] in retaliation for my interaction with Congress.”

The first trial over the secret U.S. "extraordinary rendition" program, in Milan in 2007, with 25 CIA agents among the defendants charged with the kidnapping of Abu Omar.

Giuseppe Cacace / AFP / Getty Images

In 2005, after the investigation in Italy began, the CIA instituted a travel ban for the officers connected to the rendition because arrest warrants had been issued for them in Europe. De Sousa, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born and raised in India and whose family still lives there, was concerned she would not be able to see her elderly parents. She was able to make one trip back home in September 2005 (the CIA approved it as long as she could avoid traveling through Europe) to see her father, who was hospitalized and later passed away. The following year, she asked the agency if it would pay for her mother to the U.S. for Christmas. But CIA officials balked. (De Sousa’s family was unaware of her employment with the CIA).
“They said, ‘You don’t qualify for the funds.’ They told my attorney they didn’t want to set a precedent,” she recalls. “We’re talking about $8,000. They were spending millions on this cover-up.” De Sousa says she saw the writing on the wall. “They wanted me out,” she says. “They knew what my limit was. They knew that the minute they tried to force me to sign memos saying I wouldn’t travel overseas they knew I would resign.”
But it didn’t happen as quickly as the agency would have liked. De Sousa spent three years trying to work through internal channels to bring a resolution to her case, at first raising questions about why the agency had not invoked diplomatic immunity for her and then calling attention to the rendition and alleged torture of Abu Omar by the Egyptians.
“I went through the whole thing internally,” De Sousa says. “I started off by approaching my supervisor, and then I went to the ombudsman at CIA. He was a great guy. He tried to go to bat for me and he was told to lay off. He said, ‘I can’t communicate with you anymore due to a seventh-floor edict [at the agency’s Langley headquarters where the director and other top officials work].’ I then went to the inspector general. The IG said, ‘It’s not part of our charter or mission to deal with this.”
Yet after she approached the watchdog’s office, the inspector general at the time, John Helgerson, said he wanted to launch an investigation into the rendition, De Sousa says, an assertion confirmed in a 2008 report published byThe New York Times. But the head of the NCS, Jose Rodriguez, who would later come under federal investigation for his role in ordering the destruction of nearly 100 interrogation videotapes of two high-value detainees held at black-site CIA prisons, said no. NCS would conduct its own review, Rodriguez said. In other words, the division of the CIA that De Sousa says screwed up would investigate itself.
Then-CIA Director Michael Hayden also convened an accountability-review board to look into the rendition. De Sousa asked to see the results but was told she was not authorized because she wasn’t involved in the rendition, despite the fact that she had been indicted and convicted for it.
“So I went to Congress informally,” De Sousa says. “I went to Linda Cohen, the liaison with CIA [for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]. I said, ‘Linda, did you see this review-board report?’ She said, ‘Oh, they’re smart. They sent this to committee. They put a such a high classification on it none of the staffers could see it.’” Cohen did not respond to requests for comment.
De Sousa wrote to Rodriguez and Hayden. But they did not respond to her inquiries either. “So then I started sending letters to Congress,” she says. De Sousa sent letters to members of Congress who sat on the House and Senate intelligence committees, including Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Kit Bond and Reps. Pete Hoekstra, Silvestre Reyes and Jan Schakowsky. But she says Rockefeller, Bond, Hoekstra and Reyes did not respond and Schakowsky, whose staff she met with, did not help her.
In February 2009, De Sousa resigned from the CIA, forfeiting her retirement. “I get up every morning and say, ‘Why?’ In 16 years I never saw anything like this,” she says. “I didn’t sign up for this. If they told me when I signed up ‘By the way, just to let you know, it’s possible if something happens we’re going to disavow and you may not see your family again,’ I would have said, ‘I’m not doing this.’”
She continued firing off letters. On May 18, 2009, she wrote to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “For three years, I tried every option for resolution available to me, both with my employer and in letters to the heads of several Departments and Agencies, as well as Congress and the Senate in both administrations without success,” she wrote.
Powell was Secretary of State when the Abu Omar rendition took place. He responded a couple of weeks later. “Thank you for your letter. I regret the situation you are in, but since the matter is in litigation, I am unable to be of any help,” Powell wrote. “Further, I have no knowledge about any of these matters that would give me a basis to comment or intercede.”
De Sousa says Powell’s State Department would have had to have authorized Abu Omar’s rendition, because Italy is a NATO member and the rendition took place on Italian soil.
In 2009, De Sousa sued the State Department for failing to invoke diplomatic immunity, which she argued she was entitled to as a State Department diplomat. The U.S. government retorted during a federal court hearing that it was not responsible for the actions of a foreign court. A federal district-court judge dismissed De Sousa’s case but the judge described her treatment by government officials in the Obama administration as “appalling.”
A year after she wrote to Powell, however, De Sousa secured two important meetings: one with Schakowsky’s staff and another with Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s staff.

The intelligence committees -

Schakowsky is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). She had initially expressed interest in attending the meeting, but never showed up, De Sousa says. Prior to the meeting, Adam Lurie, the staff director and counsel for HPSCI’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, asked De Sousa’s attorney, Mark Zaid, if she would be invoking the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. Zaid replied that she wouldn’t.
When De Sousa met with Schakowsky’s staffers, she says, they did not believe her claims. “They asked how did I know [about the mistakes the CIA made in rendering Abu Omar]? I said I read the cables,” De Sousa recalls. She says Schakowsky’s office never followed up. Lee Whack, a spokesman for Schakowsky, told Al Jazeera, “We are unable to comment on this issue. The congresswoman takes very seriously the privacy of anyone who brings issues to the committee. That said, we cannot discuss classified work conducted by the committee.”
De Sousa also met with Feinstein’s staff. The powerful chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), has publicly proclaimed her support for whistleblowers and urged intelligence-community employees to air their grievances with select members of Congress. De Sousa enlisted the human rights organization Human Rights First to help set up the meeting. The organization sent a letter to David Grannis, the staff director for SSCI.
De Sousa communicated via email with Grannis in August 2010 after he expressed interest in hearing what she could disclose about Abu Omar’s rendition. Grannis told her the best way for her to share the information with him “is either by hard-copy delivery” or “via secure fax.” De Sousa prepared a memo and hand delivered it to the SSCI’s security director, Jim Wolfe. She never heard from Grannis or anyone else on the intelligence committee again, she says.
An SSCI staffer, however, denies that the panel did not investigate De Sousa’s claims. The staffer says De Sousa met with “SSCI staff multiple times on subjects that I cannot confirm openly but that she was raising at the time as concerns with CIA actions.”
“Committee staff followed up with CIA independently to seek CIA’s views and explanations,” the staffer says. “Any contention that the SSCI did nothing is simply factually untrue.” De Sousa says she was never informed about any inquiries the committee made about her with the CIA.
At the time De Sousa disclosed details about the Abu Omar rendition to Grannis, the SSCI was one year into a review of the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program. The committee prepared a voluminous report on the program, the executive summary of which is currently undergoing a declassification review, and concluded that the approximately two dozen “war on terror” suspects were illegally rendered and secretly held by the CIA.
For years, De Sousa believed Abu Omar’s case would be included in the committee’s report. “It has to be,” she says. “It’s such a bungled case and it also involves torture by proxy governments [Egypt].” But the SSCI staffer told Al Jazeera in an email that the “executive summary and findings and conclusions of the committee’s report,” that is the portions due to be declassified, “do not reference Abu Omar.”
“There are passing references to him elsewhere in the report, but I wouldn’t want you to have the impression that the report focuses on him or alleged CIA actions involving him to any significant degree,” the aide said.
The CIA would not comment on the allegations De Sousa leveled against the agency or respond to questions about the Abu Omar rendition.

False promises -

Recently, Feinstein said that former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden could have and should have come to her with evidence of the agency’s mass surveillance of Americans instead of handing over a trove of highly classified documents to journalists.
De Sousa believes Feinstein would have ignored Snowden, just as her staff did, according to De Sousa, when she came to them with evidence of alleged wrongdoing by the CIA in the Abu Omar case.
And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told NPR’s Terry Gross that Snowden could have “expressed his concerns” in other ways, such as “reaching out to some of the senators” about the legality of NSA spy programs.
But when De Sousa’s attorney, Mark Zaid, wrote to Clinton at the State Department to raise concerns about her treatment and Abu Omar’s rendition and torture he never received a reply.
Earlier this month, the Senate passed an intelligence-spending bill that included new whistleblower protections for intelligence personnel that are supposed to codify Obama’s 2012 policy directive that strengthened whistleblower laws for federal workers. But the bill comes too late for De Sousa. She is now using the Freedom of Information Act in an effort to clear her name. She says she will aggressively try to pry loose government documents to reveal internal discussions about the Abu Omar rendition, whose case is pending before the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, there is still an international arrest warrant out for her. That makes traveling to visit her mother and siblings difficult.

CIA operative Sabrina De Sousa, photographed in her home in Washington, D.C., in July 2013.

Barbara L. Salisbury / MCT / Landov

She hasn’t given up on trying to hold government officials and her former colleagues accountable. “Castelli’s chain of command who approved the rendition — James Pavitt [former CIA deputy director of operations], Stephen Kappes, [a close confidante of Feinstein who was the agency’s deputy director], Tenet, Drumheller, Rodriguez and Rizzo [former CIA general counsel]. Here are the guys I wish to hold accountable,” she says. “Hayden, Rice, Feinstein and Schakowsky also have to be held accountable for the subsequent cover-up and refusal to investigate an issue that is a violation of international law and torture.”
Zaid says that during one of the oversight committee meetings he attended with De Sousa to discuss the Abu Omar case, she had told congressional staffers that she had been unable to secure a job because of the conviction. “One of the staffers actually told her to go back to India and get a job there,” Zaid says. “Can you believe that?”

http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1208712/former-cia-officer-sabrina-de-sousas.pdf

Did the Bush Administration Experiment on Detainees? | Mother Jones

Did the Bush Administration Experiment on Detainees? | Mother Jones

Not only were terrorism suspects tortured, they were also used as human guinea pigs, a new report alleges.

— By Nick Baumann

— Flickr/cristophe dune (Creative Commons).
Sun Jun. 6, 2010 9:00 PM PDT

In the course of trying to prove that its "enhanced" interrogation program was legal, the Bush administration may have broken the law, according to a new report (PDF) by Physicians for Human Rights. The watchdog group claims that in an attempt to establish that brutal interrogation tactics did not constitute torture, the administration ended up effectively experimenting on terrorism detainees. This research, PHR alleges, violated an array of regulations and treaties, including international guidelines on human testing put in place after the Holocaust.

According to the report, which draws on numerous declassified government documents, "medical professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA" frequently monitored detainee interrogations, gathering data on the effectiveness of various interrogation techniques and the pain threshholds of detainees. This information was then used to "enhance" future interrogations, PHR contends.

By monitoring post-9/11 interrogations and keeping records on the effectiveness of various techniques, medical professionals could also provide Bush administration lawyers with the information they needed to set guidelines for the use of so-called "enhanced" interrogation tactics. For instance, attorneys in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) who were devising the legal rationale for the interrogation program could use the research to determine how many times a detainee could be waterboarded. Or, based on the observations of the medical personnel monitoring the interrogation sessions, they could assess whether it was legally justifiable to administer techniques like stress positions or water dousing in combination or whether these methods needed to be applied separately.Physicians for Human Rights makes the case that since human subject research is defined as the "systematic collection of data and/or identifiable personal information for the purpose of drawing generalizable inferences," what the Bush administration was doing amounted to human experimentation:

Human experimentation without the consent of the subject is a violation of international human rights law to which the United States is subject; federal statutes; the Common Rule, which comprises the federal regulations for research on human subjects and applies to 17 federal agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense; and universally accepted health professional ethics, including the Nuremberg Code... Human experimentation on detainees also can constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity in certain circumstances.

Ironically, one goal of the "experimentation" seems to have been to immunize Bush administration officials and CIA interrogators from potential prosecution for torture. In the series of legal papers that are now popularly known as the "torture memos," Justice Department lawyers argued that medical monitoring would demonstrate that interrogators didn't intend to harm detainees; that "lack of intent to cause harm" could then serve as the cornerstone of a legal defense should an interrogator be targeted for prosecution. In 2003, in an internal CIA memo cited in the PHR report, the CIA's general counsel, Scott Muller, argued that medical monitoring of interrogations and "reviewing evidence gained from past experience where available (including experience gained in the course of U.S. interrogations of detainees)" would allow interrogators to inoculate themselves against claims of torture because it "established" they didn't intend to cause harm to the detainees.
The Bush administration believed that the medical teams could boost their legal defense in another way, too. In the memos, the OLC lawyers formulated a legal threshold for the level of pain that constituted torture. In a memo drafted on March 14, 2003, John Yoo, a primary author of the torture memos, defined that boundary as treatment leading to "long-term" mental harm or pain and suffering equal to or greater than that caused by organ failure or death. So one purpose of the medical monitoring project was to insure that the techniques interrogators were using did not breach that bright line.

One document cited in the PHR report highlights this practice especially well. On May 10, 2005, then-OLC head Steven Bradbury wrote to then-CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo about the legality of using multiple interrogation techniques simultaneously, as opposed to one by one. Referring directly to data gathered by the CIA's Office of Medical Services, Bradbury decided that both methods were okay:

But as we understand the experience involving the combination of various techniques, the OMS medical and psychological personnel have not observed any such increase in susceptibility. Other than the waterboard, the specific techniques under consideration in this memorandum— including sleep deprivation—have been applied to more than 25 detainees.… No apparent increase in susceptibility to severe pain has been observed either when techniques are used sequentially or when they are used simultaneously—for example, when an insult slap is simultaneously combined with water dousing or a kneeling stress position, or when wall standing is simultaneously combined with an abdominal slap and water dousing. Nor does experience show that, even apart from changes in susceptibility to pain, combinations of these techniques cause the techniques to operate differently so as to cause severe pain. OMS doctors and psychologists, moreover, confirm that they expect that the techniques, when combined… would not operate in a different manner from the way they do individually, so as to cause severe pain.

It's possible, of course, that the data about detainees' "susceptibility to pain" was collected as part of standard medical monitoring of interrogations. But PHR says that doesn't matter: it's clear that " the collection of medical information was acquired and applied to inform subsequent [interrogation] practices," which amounts to illicit human subject research.

PHR claims that in addition to the data on simultaneous and sequential application of interrogation techniques, the experimentation program focused on two other areas of research: the safety and effectiveness of waterboarding and the effects of sleep deprivation. In each case, PHR points to declassified documents in which Bush administration officials acknowledge how medical information gathered during interrogations is being aggregated and used to inform future questioning.

There is some evidence to suggest that someone in the Bush administration may have realized they could be vulnerable to charges of illegal experimentation. The Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in 2006, amended the 1996 War Crimes Act, a law that imposes criminal penalties for "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Specifically, the language on illegal "biological experiments" was weakened. The new law no longer requires that an experiment be carried out in the interest of the subject in order to be legal. (Research on how to make torture more effective is clearly not in the interest of the person who is going to be tortured.) In addition, it allows experiments that do not "endanger" the subject—rather than simply prohibiting all experiments that "are not justified by the medical, dental, or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest," as the previous version did.

The PHR report doesn't produce a smoking gun—there's no memo saying "we're going to experiment on detainees." The organization acknowledges as much, noting that none of the actual medical monitoring data from interrogations has ever been made public. PHR says that only a "comprehensive federal investigation" can answer the questions raised by its report. But don't hold your breath for one. To date, the "enhanced interrogation" program itself has yet to be fully probed.

UPDATE: Here's a video of faith leaders responding to the PHR report and calling for an investigation.

 

Former Iraq Interrogator Dismantles Cheney's Argument

Matthew Alexander--who writes at VetVoice as Major Matthew--spent some time last week deconstructing former Vice President Dick Cheney's claims about torture.

Dick Cheney says that torturing detainees has saved American lives. That claim is patently false. Cheney's torture policy was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of American servicemen and women.

Matthew Alexander was the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, at the time, a higher priority target than Osama bin Laden. Mr. Alexander has personally conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them.

"Torture does not save lives. Torture costs us lives," Mr. Alexander said in an exclusive interview at Brave New Studios. "And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool...These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse....literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives."

Sound off at http://bravenewfoundation.org

Here's the clip:

Is Kit Bond smarter then a 5th Grader, a Turnip or even my Cat?

No, No and a BIG NO! I saw Kit "Chuckles the Idiot Clown" Bond on the TV machine with Chris Matthews last night, and I truly could not believe his answers to the questions Chris was asking him.

From the January 22 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: But we begin with Senator Bond. Senator Kit Bond joins us from Capitol Hill. Senator Bond, what is your thinking when you heard that Barack Obama's going to close Gitmo?

BOND: Well, I think it's irresponsible to say you're going to close Gitmo without having a plan. What are you going to do with the hardened terrorists that are there? I can't think of any town or city in Missouri who wants to have hardened criminals, illegal combatants like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah coming into their community.

Now, if you don't bring them back to the United States, if you release them, we know already, that's more than 60 of the people who have been released have been killing our troops, our Americans and civilians on the battlefield. If you really want to bring them back to the United States, people in Missouri and Kansas believe Gitmo is just fine. Folks in San Francisco want it closed. I'd suggest you put them in Alcatraz.

MATTHEWS: Well, why wouldn't you imprison somebody after holding a trial or execute them? Why don't we do it by law? What's the problem with doing it the usual way?

Kit was first asked what he thought about President Obama's plan to close Gitmo. Kit thought it was irresponsible to close it without a plan, and what are we going to do with all the "Hardened Terrorists" we has housed there. Yeah, like these folks have been lounging around at the "Gitmo Bar and Grill", watching sporting events, and drinking those cute little drinks with the umbrellas in, talking about world politics, and how well they've been treated the last 7 years! Yeah right. If these folks didn't have an agenda when they first went in, now they had one, and are even more pissed off. But a lot of them weren't even originally apprehended by American Forces. They were there because folks back in Afghanistan, fellow villages, or tribal members were pissed because Khalid stole one of his goats, so he turned him in as an Al Qaeda member, and to collect the bounty. Some are probably very messed up, from a mental health standpoint, from the years of torture. You, Mr. Kit helped harden them by your detention and torture programs, you ignorant asshole!

Then Kit goes on to say the folks in Missouri don't want these criminals in their neighborhoods, like they'll be out and wandering around the neighborhood selling pencils to survive. This man's whole argument is based on fearmongering, ignorance, and faulty logic. He also has a slim grasp of the legal system when talking about lawful orders given to folks, like, "Torture Kalid Sheikh Mohammad, because Mr. Yoo or Woo or whatever wrote a memo and said it was OK." I can't grasp the fact that these folks forgot about the US Constitution, the Geneva Convention and UCMJ. It is just beyond comprehension. It baffles me that these dirtbags continue to rationalize and justify their immoral, and illegal behavior. I just don't get it?

Of course Senator Kit had to throw out that ring-winged talking point, which are usually myths, or some made up shit to suit their twisted and warped agenda. And the sad thing is, that there is a whole class of brain dead troglodytes throughout the country that buy into these lies, and see them as facts, and in Wyoming, they are in the majority. Look at the 3 members of Congress they just elected. We have Cynthis Lummis, our new House of Representative member, who has already voted against equal pay for women by voting against the "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009"
and Sen. Enzi and Sen. Barrasso have already showed which way they are leaning by voting against Cloture motion so debate on the same "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009" in the senate could get started. What the heck is wrong with these Wyoming dipshits? As Obama told these same republicans (Not necessarily Enzi and Barrasso.) today at a meeting to discuss his stimulus package, and the repubs wanted all these tax-breaks for you know who (Not the middle class) and also wanted to slash spending on infrastructure projects, not pork, to stimulate the economy, and the middle class. Well Barack told them, "I WON!" Short and sweet and true. Now back to Kit's Mythology...

Kit started talking about the 60+ Gitmo Hardened Terrorists who made their way back onto the battlefield, killing our Americans, both military and civilians. The problem with this myth is that there are no facts to back it up. None, nada, not a single thing to verify his claim. He is just making up shit again. part of the ongoing fearmongering campaign, that has failed to work for the last election, but these assholes forgot to throw out the playbook. My cat is even smarter then that, because if he does something, like sleep on me when I'm in bed, and I throw him off, he takes that out of his playbook. My Cat is smarter then Kit! Wow!

The New York Times reported on January 23 2009, that "although the Pentagon has said that dozens of released Guantánamo detainees have 'returned to the fight,' its claim is difficult to document, and has been met with skepticism."

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell during a January 13, 2009 press conference, asserted: "The new numbers are, we believe, 18 confirmed and 43 suspected of returning to the fight. So 61 in all former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight."

And in a Press release on January 15th, 2009, from Seton Hall University Law:

The Seton Hall Center for Policy and Research has issued a report which rebuts and debunks the most recent claim by the Department of Defense (DOD) that “61, in all, former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.”

Professor Denbeaux of the Center for Policy & Research has said that the Center has determined that “DOD has issued 'recidivism' numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong—this last time the most egregiously so.”

Denbeaux stated: “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there. They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning—except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.

"Forty-three times they have given numbers—which conflict with each other—all of which are seriously undercut by the DOD statement that 'they do not track' former detainees. Rather than making up numbers “willy-nilly” about post release conduct, America might be better served if our government actually kept track of them.”
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So, again, with less then 4 days into the Obama Administration, the right-winged nut jobs are out and about, spreading their vitriol, fearmongering and lies to deceive the American People!!! I know they will succeed with some, because they are not smarter then a 5th grader, a turnip or my cat either.

This country is in trouble if we let these morally corrupt degenerates gain any glimmer of power, as they will destroy our country, our freedoms, our children, our rights, our lives, and our planet. God, please help us from your severely mentally ill and deranged children, and place them in a facility (And I'm not talking about Congress as that facility.) where they can do no harm to us, this country, the world, and themselves. Thank you God!

PS- This is an important read about torture , Army Field Manual, and Obama over at firedoglake by bmaz.

As per Ms. Dana Perino's statement...

It is not the "policy" of this administration to torture people. Policy, policy, POLICY!!! It's against the law, both our Constitution and the Geneva Convention. I'm not an angel, and I have made mistakes in my life, for which I am responsible and accountable, and have paid a price for my illegal behavior. But not these folks, and Ms. "Stepford" Perino, and her ignorant and outright stupid comments over the years. Are her morals and ethics so damaged that she doesn't have a fucking clue what she is promoting? And delaying the truth is just another form of denial for these dirt bags.

The sad thing is Dick Cheney is coming back to Wyoming after his tour of duty, and for some that sucks, as I live in a beautiful state, with some really great people. Now, there are those who idolize him like he is some deity, or God, and are totally blind to his alleged war crimes. But I think there is enough evidence available to convict the bastard, and let that smirking S.O.B. rot in prison the rest of his natural born life. I hope the World Court at the Hague indicts him and his friends for their high crimes and misdemeanors. His worshipers here in Wyoming are some of the same koolaid drinking knuckleheads who still believe Obama is a Muslim, or that Saddam had something to do with the WTC. And I bet some of them same middle aged men sat at home and fantasized about screwing Sarah Palin. And all she was for the Republicans was a marketing tool, because sex, and sexuality is used to great effect in marketing, and it sells. Sex sells as they say. Look how well she did with the ignorant and un and under-educated.

Now, back to the torture issue. You see, the guy who is suppose to bring these kangaroo court cases forward in this hokey tribunal system said they are not going to bring this one guy's case forward because he was, was, was TORTURED! I tell you these people are extremely fucked up, as there should be consequences for this illegal behavior. The #1 question on change.gov for Obama is about torture and accountability, questions he said he would answer. My guess is that he is waiting till the 21st, so Bush Co. can't start throwing out pre-indictment pardons to protect his deviant and sick co-horts. I mean, I have never seen such spin in my life regarding this issue. US laws say water-boarding is torture, and we have prosecuted folks for it. Now it is in some existential 7th dimension. Mukasey, our AG who followed Alberto de Turdo, he couldn't even answer one simple question, Is water-boarding torture? He went into this big dissertation and double-talk about bullshit, and the little spineless lackeys in the Senate gave him a pass. A pass? I couldn't believe it. I almost shit in my draws when I heard that. I just shake my head sometimes when I hear some of this bizarro news. Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. Obama better do something about this, and not out of revenge, although that might feel good for a little while, but because of the oath he will be taking, that being, To preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the US, the same one Dubya and Dick took, but to them it was just a ceremonial thing, and the Constitution is just a piece of paper. Obviously they were sleeping in Pol Sci - 101 because they didn't learn a damn thing. They are a bunch of narcissistic, self-centered, greedy, ego-maniacal bastards, and as you can tell, I do not like them at all. The bottom line for these folks is money and greed. like they say, just follow the money!



Term limits, sunshine laws, enfranchisement of felons and the education for all voters/Americans are some of my Christmas wishes, along with the standard Peace on Earth, which I do strongly believe in! Amen Brother!