The Mother of All Messes

Paul Craig Roberts | July 23, 2008

Republicans are sending around the Internet a photo of a cute little boy whose T-shirt reads: "The mess in my pants is nothing compared to the mess Democrats will make of this country if they win Nov. 2nd."

One can only wonder at the insouciance of this message. Are Republicans unaware of the amazing mess the Bush regime has made? It is impossible to imagine a bigger mess. Republicans have us at war in two countries as a result of Republican lies and deceptions, and we might be in two more wars – Iran and Pakistan – by November. We have alienated the entire Muslim world and most of the rest.

The dollar has lost 60% of its value against the euro, and the once mighty dollar is losing its reserve currency role.

The Republicans’ policies have driven up the price of both oil and gold by 400%.

Inflation is in double digits. Employment is falling.

The Republican economy in the 21st century has been unable to create net new jobs for Americans except for low-wage domestic services such as waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks and hospital orderlies. Republican deregulation brought about fraud in mortgage lending and dangerous financial instruments which have collapsed the housing market, leaving a million or more homeowners facing foreclosure. The financial system is in disarray and might collapse from insolvency. The trade and budget deficits have exploded. The US trade deficit is larger than the combined trade deficits of every deficit country in the world.

The US can no longer finance its wars or its own government and relies on foreign loans to function day to day. To pay for its consumption, the US sells its existing assets – companies, real estate, toll roads, whatever it can offer – to foreigners.

Republicans have run roughshod over the US Constitution, Congress, the courts and civil liberties. Republicans have made it perfectly clear that they believe that our civil liberties make us unsafe – precisely the opposite view of our Founding Fathers. Yet, Republicans regard themselves as the Patriotic Party.

The Republicans have violated the Nuremberg prohibitions against war crimes, and they have violated the Geneva Conventions against torture and abuse of prisoners. Republican disregard for human rights ranks with that of history’s great tyrants.

The Republicans have put in place the foundation for a police state. I am confident that the Democrats, too, will make a mess. But can they beat this record?

We must get the Republicans totally out of power, or we will have no country left for the Democrats to mess up.

I say this as a person who has done as much for the Republican Party as anyone. I helped to devise and to get implemented an economic policy that cured stagflation and that brought Republicans back into political competition after Watergate. If I could have looked into a crystal ball and seen that under a free trade banner, Republicans would enable corporate executives to pay themselves millions of dollars in "performance pay" for deserting their American work forces and hiring foreigners in their place, thus destroying the aspirations and careers of millions of Americans, I never would have helped the Republicans. If a crystal ball had revealed that a neoconned Republican Party would launch wars of naked aggression against countries that posed no threat to the United States, I would have shouted my warnings even earlier.

The neoconned Republican Party is the greatest threat America has ever faced. Let me tell you why.

How many Republicans can you name who respect and honor the Constitution? There are Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and who? The ranks of Republican constitutional supporters quickly grow thin.

The reason is that Republicans view the Constitution as a coddling device for criminals and terrorists. Republicans think the Constitution can be set aside for evil-doers and kept in place for everyone else. But without the Constitution we only have the government’s word as to who is an evil-doer.

This would be the word of the same infallible government that told us that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that were on the verge of being used against America, the same infallible government that told us that Guantanamo prison held "770 of the most dangerous persons alive" and then, after stealing 5 years of their lives, quietly released 500 of them as mistaken identities.

Republicans think the United States is the salt of the earth and that American hegemony over the rest of the world is not only justified by our great virtue but necessary to our safety. People this full of hubris are incapable of judgment. People incapable of judgment should never be given power.

Republicans have no sympathy for anyone but their own kind. How many Republicans do you know who care a hoot about the plight of the poor, the jobless, the medically uninsured? The government programs that Republicans are always adamant to cut are the ones that help people who need help.

I have yet to hear any of my Republican friends express any concern whatsoever for the 1.2 million Iraqis who have died, and the 4 million who have been displaced, as a result of Bush’s gratuitous invasion. Many tell me that the five- and six-year-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are due to wimpy Americans "who don’t have the balls it takes" to win. Killing and displacing a quarter of the Iraqi population is just a wimpy result of a population that lacks testosterone. Real Americans would have killed them all by now. Macho patriotic Republicans are perfectly content for US foreign policy to be controlled by Israel. Republican evangelical "christian" churches teach their congregations that America’s purpose in the world is to serve Israel. And these are the flag-wavers.

Those of us who think America is the Constitution, and that loyalty means loyalty to the Constitution, not to office holders or to a political party or to a foreign country, are regarded by Republicans as "anti-American."

Neoconservatives, such as Billy Kristol, insist that loyalty to the country means loyalty to the government. Thus, criticizing the government for launching wars of aggression and for violating constitutionally protected civil liberties is, according to neoconservatives, a disloyal act.

In the neoconservative view, there is no place for the voices of citizens: the government makes the decisions, and loyal citizens support the government’s decisions.

In the neocon political system there is no liberty, no democracy, no debate. Dissenters are traitors.

The neoconservative magazine, Commentary, wants the New York Times indicted for telling Americans that the Bush regime was caught violating US law, specifically the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, by spying on Americans without obtaining warrants as required by law. Note that neoconservatives think it is a criminal act for a newspaper to tell its readers that their government is spying on them illegally.

Judging by their behavior, a number of Democrats go along with the neocon view. Thus, the Democrats don’t offer a greatly different profile. They went along with the views that corporate profits and the war on terror take precedence over everything else. They have not used the congressional power that the electorate gave them in the 2006 elections.

However, Democrats, or at least some of them, do care about the Constitution. If it were not for Democratic appointees to the federal courts and the ACLU (essentially a Democratic organization), the Bush regime would have completely destroyed our civil liberties. Some Democrats are "bleeding hearts," who actually care about suffering people they don’t know, and who think that we have obligations to others. Have you ever heard of a bleeding heart Republican?

Traditionally, Democrats objected whenever policies resulted in a handful of rich people capturing all of the income gains from the economy. There might still be a few such Democrats left. Looking at the Republican mess, I doubt that Democrats, try as they may, can equal it.

Obama says nuclear Iran poses "grave threat"

Rebecca Harrison | July 23, 2008

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday a nuclear Iran would pose a "grave threat" and that the world must stop Tehran from obtaining an atomic weapon.

Obama told reporters during a visit to Israel that if elected, he would take "no options off the table" in dealing with the Iran issue and said tougher sanctions could be imposed.

"A nuclear Iran would pose a grave threat and the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon," Obama told reporters after visiting the Israeli town of Sderot, which lies close to the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

He said the international community should immediately offer "big sticks and big carrots" to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program. The West suspects Iran wants to build atom bombs but the Islamic Republic says its aims are peaceful.

"Iranians need to understand that whether it's the Bush administration or the Obama administration, this is a paramount concern to the United States," he said in Sderot, which has been hit by cross-border rockets fired by Gaza-based militants.

Israel says Iran provides funds and weapons to Hamas.

"I think there are opportunities for us to mobilize a much more serious regime of sanctions on Iran, but also to offer them the possibility of improved relations to the international community if they stand down on these nuclear weapons."

(Writing by Rebecca Harrison; Editing by Adam Entous)

Navy Prosecutor In Gitmo Case: fourth plane shot down
“Bin Laden driver” case contains revealing details

Steve Watson | July 23, 2008

Though the trial the man, dubbed “Osama bin Laden’s driver”, is primarily functioning as a show piece for the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, some interesting information emerged from the Guantanamo Bay naval base yesterday in the form of a direct admission from a US prosecutor that the fourth plane was “shot down”.

The revelation came during assertions from representatives for the prosecution that Salim Hamdan had detailed knowledge of the intended target of the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11.

A Reuters report states:

…prosecutor Timothy Stone told the six-member jury of U.S. military officers who will decide Hamdan’s guilt or innocence that Hamdan had inside knowledge of the 2001 attacks on the United States because he overheard a conversation between bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“If they hadn’t shot down the fourth plane it would’ve hit the dome,” Stone, a Navy officer, said in his opening remarks.

The tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Col. Lawrence Morris, later explained that Stone was quoting Hamdan in evidence that will be presented at trial. Morris declined to say if the “dome” was a reference to the U.S. Capitol.

The report goes on to state “United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania. U.S. officials have never stated it was shot down although rumors saying that abound to this day.”

Were Stone’s words a “slip of the tongue” in the vain of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s when he also told reporters that flight 93 was shot down?

Flight 93 had an 8 mile wide debris field, a fact that does not tally with official story that the aircraft was fully intact in the seconds before it hit the ground.

Large pieces of fuselage were also recovered from a marina in Indian Lake, a couple of miles away from the crash site, and the planes engines, which according to the laws of physics should have plunged deep into the ground along with the rest of the airliner were never found.

Only a one-ton segment of an engine was ever recovered, again more than a mile from the crash site, which the FBI declared had ‘bounced’ there.

The wreckage from flight 93 remains under armed guard inside Iron Mountain.

Eyewitness accounts, in addition to one call from the flight, also describe loud engine noises, white smoke and parts falling from the flight as it approached its final resting place.

We have previously reported on credible individuals who claim to have personally talked with the pilots who shot the plane down.

Watchdog: Leaked photos show troops fly in squalor

Nick Juliano | July 22, 2008

A government watchdog has uncovered pictures that suggest US troops on their way to battlefields in Afghanistan travel in squalor while top military and government officials are cocooned in “comfort capsules” with reclining leather seats and flat-screen TVs.

Last week, the Project on Government Oversight asked for photos of the dilapidated airline seats; it wasn’t long before pictures of torn, moldy, stained seats started rolling in. POGO did not identify the source of its photos, but it said they were taken at Al Udeid Airbase in Afghanistan.

The watchdog, which focuses on exposing waste, fraud and abuse in the US government, recently worked with the Washington Post to expose an Air Force program to spend money earmarked for the War on Terror to upgrade luxury cabins used to ferry top officials. Internal e-mails POGO obtained through a public records request showed “that Air Force generals frivolously blew hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars because they didn’t like the color of seat belts, carpet, leather and wood used in work and living space units being developed for use on cargo planes,” the group says.

In its request for the photos, POGO said it was “aware” of deplorable conditions in troop transport seats and noted that a program aimed to “remedy the current deplorable state of these seats … is moving too slowly,” as opposed to the plans to upgrade the cabins for top brass, which were known as Senior Leader Intransit Comfort Capsules.

The Post noted that the Air Force already provided top-notch arrangements for VIP travel before seeking the new cabins.

The Air Force already has two trailers, known as Silver Bullets, that can be loaded aboard large transports for use by top military and civilian officers, plus a fleet of about 100 planes specifically meant for VIP travel. But McMahon, who is now the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for logistics, installations and mission support, said the new program was started because the service ferried more “senior travelers” to distant regions after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and identified a “gap” in its capability.

The existing trailers already seem pretty cozy. UK’s Metro obtained some pictures of a modified Airstream trailer that took First Lady Laura Bush to Afghanistan recently.

“With wood panelling, plush grey carpet, comfy leather seats and, most importantly, thick window shades, Mrs Bush could forget she was anywhere near the War on Terror being played out below the clouds,” Miles Erwin wrote for Metro.

House Judiciary Committee to Hear Kucinich Impeachment Resolution on Friday

Kurt Nimmo | July 23, 2008

On Friday, Dennis Kucinich will take his impeachment resolution against Bush to the House Judiciary Committee. Kucinich argues that Bush has violated his oath of office, violated U.S. and international law, has trashed the Constitution, and poses a serious threat to the nation. “I want to thank you for the support which you have given to my efforts to hold this administration accountable for taking us into a war based on lies, and for the destruction of the rule of law and the destruction of cherished Constitutional principles,” Kucinich says in the YouTube video posted here.

On July 10, Kucinich pared down his 35 articles of impeachment to one and the House voted 238 to 180 to send this single article to the Judiciary Committee, which buried Kucinich’s previous 35-article effort in June. Democrat leaders of the House have promised not to discuss impeachment during the proceedings, thus attempting to derail the constitutional process required to initiate impeachment. Instead of beginning the impeachment process, Democrats have decided to conduct what the Los Angeles Times calls “an election-year review” of Bush’s abuse of power. “The hearing is a modest gesture by House Democratic leaders to members like Kucinich who insist that Bush’s reasons for going to war meet the standard for impeachment,” the LA Times reported on July 16.

Recall House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declaring after the Democrats swept the elections in 2006 that “impeachment is off the table.” On July 10, Pelosi said Kucinich’s article is “a Judiciary Committee matter, and I believe we will see some attention being paid to it by the Judiciary Committee.” On Friday we shall see if she really means it or if she is simply attempting to placate those of us who believe impeachment is long over due.

Mr. Kucinich should be commended for his persistent effort to bring Bush and his coterie of neocons to justice for their crimes. After a House committee buried his impeachment resolution, he turned around an introduced another one and has promised to continue to do so until action is taken. “Citizens can either sit back and hope for more blips to appear on the radar, or we can make them appear by asking Rep. Heath Shuler to cosponsor Kucinich’s bill, to encourage Judiciary Committee Chair Conyers to hold hearings and to ask Speaker Pelosi to move this business forward,” writes Kim Carlyle of Veterans for Peace.

Chairman John Conyers has said he wants public discussion of the issues being raised by Kucinich, but does not plan to take any action. “We’re not doing impeachment, but he can talk about it,” Conyers told CQ Politics. Kucinich’s earlier resolutions were referred to Conyers’ committee, which took no action on them. After the 2006 election, when the Democrats gained control of Congress, Conyers said impeachment would be politically untenable. Prior to this, he appeared to be an impeachment advocate. Last August, however, Conyers said “Nancy Pelosi has impeachment ‘off the table,’ but that’s off her table, it is not off John Conyers’ table.” On Friday, we will likely get more clarification.

Willie Nelson Announces 9/11, Anti-War Event on the Alex Jones Show

Kurt Nimmo | July 23, 2008

In a landmark and impromptu interview today on the Alex Jones Show, music icon and genuine American hero Willie Nelson addressed the impending attack against Iran and Dennis Kucinich’s article of impeachment, scheduled to go before the House Judiciary Committee on Friday.

Calling in from a music tour venue in Council Bluff, Iowa, Willie stated that George Bush and his neocon minions cannot be allowed to get away with fraudulently invading Iraq and engaging in mass murder without "even a slap on the wrist." Impeachment, according to Nelson, is a "minor way" to deal with crimes of such a horrific magnitude. However, supporting Kucinich’s brave and tenacious effort in the House of Representatives "might slow the guy down" in regard to the planned invasion of Iran, tentatively set for either September or October, according to numerous insiders and experts.

Willie admitted he does not know if it is too late to stop the drive toward confrontation with Iran. If the attack manages to go forward he warned "America will not be the same America" and the country will be "in for some tough times," including the distinct possibility of an economic depression and the imposition of martial law.

It is imperative that we turn the country around, Willie averred, and once again "set ourselves up as peacemakers," not as arbiters of endless war, mass murder, and engineered chaos. It is time to get off the path Bush and his neocon puppet masters have steered the nation down over the last seven and a half years. In addition, we must deal decisively with the "guys pulling the strings" and not allow them to simply "throw George under the bus" and escape justice. It is important that Dennis Kucinich "keep hitting them on the sore spot" and eventually set the stage to bring every last criminal neocon to justice. Success in this effort depends to a large degree upon circumventing the corporate media.

In regard to the events of September 11, 2001, Nelson said it does not take a "German scientist to realize we were hit by some inside people" on that day and it will take dedication and more concerted activism to eventually bring the perpetrators to justice. Earlier this year, Willie went on the Alex Jones Show and declared his belief the WTC and Building 7 were imploded like a "casino in Las Vegas" brought down by demolition. "They’re trying to tell me that an airplane did it and I can’t go along with that," Nelson told Jones and his audience on February 4.

Finally, in response to a caller from Arizona, who mentioned Willie’s Live Aid and Farm Aid concerts, Nelson indicated he would be interested in volunteering to participate in a 9/11 truth, anti-war, and impeachment concert event. Such an event would "give the people a venue" and a "chance to stand up" against the government. After the interview, Alex discussed the issue off-air with Willie and it was decided the details for such an event would be worked out in the next few days and the event would take place in either New York or Austin, Texas.

Cardinal Blogger Rule No 1 - Never joke about people who think they are omnipotent, have their food pre-tasted and their car doors opened for them and could add yours at the stroke of a pen to the over 1 million names - and growing at the rate of Godonlyknowshowmanythousands each day - on the U.S. Homeland Security "Banned from flying on commercial jets" Terrorist List.

Even though there are distinct advantages if you make it. (The list.) Never having to answer if you packed your own bag or take off your mucky shit-encrusted wellingtons (rubber boots) after being on a quarantined Mad-Cow and Bird-Flu farm for the last 2 weeks from where you are carrying a form of agricultural plant - or substance - in a clear plastic bag.

However, as a firm believer in the "you don't have to worry if you haven't done anything wrong" philosophy of peaceful co-existence and anyway I'm flying soon to see my Grannie in Melbourne on a Quantas Boeing 747 from London via Hong Kong with a quick stopover in Manila I won't.

i.e. Joke about them, the list or Godonlyknowshowmanythousands.

Today, I only recommend as your compulsory summer beach reading.

And before buying, stealing or borrowing it - without their permission and I'll delete it immediately if they object - read, print and distribute to every schoolchild, this fantastic piece from Slate first.

(http://www.slate.com/id/2195533)

Who in the Bush administration broke the law, and who could be prosecuted?

By Emily Bazelon, Kara Hadge, Dahlia Lithwick, and Chris Wilson

The recent release of Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side revealed that a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross determined "categorically" that the CIA used torture, as defined by American and international law, in questioning al-Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah. The question of criminal liability for Bush-administration officials has since been in the news. It's also getting play because retired Gen. Antonio Taguba, lead Army investigator of the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, wrote in a recent report, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes." (Update: And today, the ACLU released three new memos from the Department of Justice and the CIA, which for the first time show DoJ explicitly authorizing "enhanced" interrogation tactics for use on specific detainees. One of the memos states, in this context, that "interrogation techniques, including the waterboard, do not violate the Torture Statute.")

One response to the amassing evidence is Nuremberg-style war-crime prosecutions. The opposite pole is blanket immunity for all lawbreakers in advance. Somewhere in the middle lies a truth-and-reconciliation commission that would try to ferret out the truth.

To enter into the debate, you might ask which Bush administration officials did what and which could actually be prosecuted. Slate has answers.

What kind of lawbreaking has happened on President Bush's watch, among his top and mid-level advisers? What hasn't? Who is implicated and who is not? Despite the lack of oral sex with an intern, the past seven years have yielded an embarrassment of riches when it comes to potentially prosecutable crimes. We have tried to sketch out a map of who did what and when, with links to the evidence that is public and notes about what we may learn from investigations that are still pending.

We looked specifically at the White House, the office of the vice presidency, the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, and the State Department. We started with a question about whether anyone could be prosecuted for war crimes relating to the torture identified by the International Committee of the Red Cross. We soon spiraled out to trace related loops: warrantless wiretapping and the destruction of CIA tapes of the interrogations of two high-level suspects. And then we added in scandals that involve many of the same players and that have spawned investigations: the firing of the U.S. attorneys in 2006 in the Justice Department as well as politicized hirings there. In the main, the laws and treaties we concentrated on were the Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act, the Convention Against Torture, obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence, perjury, lying to Congress, the Civil Service Reform Act, and the Hatch Act.

The accompanying diagram (click here or on the module above to launch it) highlights a truth of criminal conspiracy: Whenever legal liability is spread among many actors, it becomes difficult to ascertain with any specificity who's on the hook for what. This, to steal a phrase from Douglas Feith, is "the whole point."

Another truism of criminal prosecution is that it's easier to go after the coverup than the crime. For that reason, we think the likelihood that, say, Alberto Gonzales gets nicked for lying to Congress or that someone gets nailed for destroying the CIA tapes is higher than the chance that John Yoo ever goes to court for suggesting that an interrogation tactic is torture only if it causes pain on the level of organ failure. Or that David Addington or Gonzales—or Dick Cheney or President Bush—ever gets nailed for urging or accepting that advice. Whether that is fair or right or just is for you to judge.

Because our focus here was on the architects of the lawless acts, we have stayed high on the chain in command, rather than naming specific interrogators for acts of alleged torture or indicting specific telecoms for warrantless eavesdropping. The lower-level players we did include are those we think may have helped shape administration policy. Often, these underlings have been left holding the legal bag. In fact, a pattern emerges: Time and again it appears that fairly low-level or inexperienced lawyers were encouraged to write "blue sky" memos authorizing the broadest range of abusive or improperly partisan behaviors. Their superiors never seriously vetted those memos. And, again, that's the point: The higher-ups have cover. They can both claim that the memos were merely thought experiments and, if push comes to shove, leave the low-ranking attorneys in the line of fire. This, we think, helps explain why high-level officials like Jim Haynes, former DoD general counsel, have gone to such length to insist that the call to expand the interrogation arsenal came from the "bottom up," not the "top down."

How likely are the prosecutions that we make a theoretical case for or against? For the most part, that's a political question, not a legal one. In general, we doubt that we'll see a host of criminal prosecutions anytime soon, but we are also waiting on criminal investigations, several key inspector general's reports, and still-classified documents. Who knows—maybe this diagram will change shape over the coming months or years.

Coercive interrogation

Can any Bush officials be prosecuted for the policies that paved the way for secret imprisonment, rendition to other countries that torture, or American torture of terrorism suspects? These government lawyers and policymakers decimated the Geneva Conventions, defined their way out of compliance with the Convention Against Torture, and also sailed by the War Crimes Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They either approved or allowed for techniques including water-boarding, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and more. But could any of them go to prison for this?

The opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice—written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, apparently in consultation with David Addington and perhaps others—provided a legal justification for the interrogations and related actions. The OLC is the president's top-secret legal shop: An internal Supreme Court for legal rulings within any administration. Taken together, the opinions operate as a "golden shield," as former OLC head Jack Goldsmith has put it. It will be—and should be—extremely difficult to prosecute any government official who relied on the OLC opinions. What about the lawyers who created those opinions or urged them into existence?

Author Philippe Sands has observed in his recent book Torture Team that there was a prosecution at Nuremberg for those who gave legal advice (captured in the film Judgment at Nuremberg). Others have warned that some of the architects of torture policy may be prosecuted if they travel abroad.

Ultimately, the only meaningful chance for domestic prosecution, it seems to us, would be for someone in the inner circle to flip and reveal that together its members conspired to break the law, by knowingly crafting or urging the crafting of opinions that had no legitimate legal foundation. So far, however, the inner circle hasn't cracked. Indeed, its members have stuck to the story that the impetus for harsh interrogation tactics came not from the "top down," as Sands has argued, but from the "bottom up"—from the lawyers on the line at Guantanamo and rogue interrogators who took the law into their own hands. These are shades of the Abu Ghraib bad-apples defense, which led to the prosecution only of low-level soldiers. If it's proved false, then players like David Addington and Jim Haynes could be on the hook for lying to Congress. But that's a big if.

Destruction of the CIA tapes

Between 2003 and 2005, the CIA taped the interrogations of high-level suspects Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. For almost two years after that, lawyers within the agency—and without—debated what to do with them. The tapes were never handed over to the 9/11 Commission, which had requested such materials, nor to any of the federal judges presiding over cases of other Guantanamo detainees, at least one of whom had demanded them. Indeed, the government denied such tapes existed. And then it made them disappear. The tapes of Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were destroyed in 2007, reportedly after an order from the head of the CIA's clandestine operations, Jose Rodriguez. Did Rodriguez make this call on his own or with the approval or urging of top Bush officials? And did the destruction of the tapes, amid questions about the legality of the tactics they captured on film, amount to obstruction of justice or a related charge? After much prodding by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Ma,. and others, current Attorney General Michael Mukasey authorized a full-blown criminal investigation of the destruction of the tapes, by prosecutor John Durham of the U.S. Attorney's office in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, in March the Pentagon revealed that the interrogations of other suspects had also been taped. These include detainee Ali Al-Marri, the only government-designated enemy combatant being held on U.S. soil. His lawyers are fighting over the status of those tapes in court.

U.S. Attorney Firings

After nine U.S. attorneys were fired in 2006, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and some of his aides were accused of trying to clear out lawyers who'd failed to exhibit sufficient fealty to the Bush administration, either by refusing to prosecute flimsy cases against Democrats or by prosecuting strong ones against politically powerful Republicans. E-mail chatter within the Justice Department throughout the process of firings, which began shortly after the 2004 election, reflected sleazy ideological reasoning but offered up little in the way of a smoking gun. Congressional testimony by Gonzales and former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and others created a haze of finger-pointing and fibs. The Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that investigates and prosecutes prohibited personnel practices, is currently investigating the role politics may have played in the firings. Although the dismissals themselves probably will not give rise to criminal charges—U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president—false testimony about the process could cause trouble for Justice Department officials and aides.

Hiring in the Justice Department

Even before the U.S. attorney firings in 2006, the Justice Department was apparently making politicized hiring decisions that violated its own standards. A joint investigation (PDF) by the department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility bitingly found that in 2002 and 2006, candidates for the prestigious Summer Law Internship and Honors Programs were weeded out because their résumés sent liberal signals (environmental advocacy, the American Constitution Society). Last month, one rejected applicant sued the Justice Department (with 359 others waiting in the wings) on the basis of the findings in the I.G./OPR report. A second joint investigation is examining politicized hiring in the Civil Rights Division after a suspiciously large increase in the number of conservative lawyers hired there between 2003 and 2005. Meanwhile, the Office of Special Counsel is conducting its own investigation into the Justice Department's hiring procedures.

Wiretapping

In the fall of 2001, the National Security Agency sought broad power to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and people abroad. Since 1978, when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA's surveillance of domestic-to-international communications had been vetted by a special court, which reviews applications for warrants. In an urgent circumstance, the agency could eavesdrop for 72 hours before applying for a warrant, and the court had rejected its warrants applications in only a tiny number of cases. Still, the Bush administration wanted more leeway. And so, based on an opinion by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, the NSA bypassed the FISA court and began to conduct warrantless wiretapping on calls and communications from the United States to a foreign country or vice versa.

Yoo's opinion, which has never been released, was kept secret from the NSA's own lawyers and from Congress, including the chairmen and ranking minority members of the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees. Jane Mayer reports that David Addington, Jim Haynes, and Tim Flanigan enlisted Yoo to write his analysis, which rested on the administration's favored all-expansive theory of executive power. When Jack Goldsmith reviewed Yoo's work after becoming head of the OLC, he told Mayer "it was the biggest legal mess I had ever seen in my life." Then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey was also unimpressed. In a Hollywood car-chase moment, he and Goldsmith rushed to the hospital bed of the critically ill John Ashcroft in time to persuade Ashcroft not to sign a reauthorization for the NSA program, which Alberto Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card stormed into the room with.

The New York Times exposed the NSA warrantless wiretapping in December 2005. After much wrangling over the merits of the program and immunity for telecom companies that turned over their records to the government, Congress caved and amended FISA to give the White House the broad wiretapping powers it wanted.

John Ashcroft
Justice Department
Attorney General
Implicated in: Coercive interrogation, DoJ hiring, wiretapping

Ashcroft was a member of the "principals committee," which, ABC reports, met in the White House repeatedly to discuss and approve specific torture tactics, including water-boarding and physical assault. Ashcroft oversaw the withdrawal of the John Yoo torture memo by Jack Goldsmith, suggesting that he was aware—at least in hindsight—of the shoddy legal reasoning supporting it. But in recent congressional testimony, Ashcroft insisted that the Yoo memo authorized nothing that was illegal and that no procedure allowed pursuant to that memo has been deemed torture.

Case for prosecution: Ashcroft was the head of the Justice Department when torture was approved. The Office of Legal Counsel answered to him.

Case against prosecution: The difficulty of prosecuting lawyers for legal advice. Ashcroft has shown himself to be kind of a hero in retrospect, at least on the warrantless-wiretapping front.

Lt. Col. Diane Beaver
U.S. Armed Forces
Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo
Implicated in: coercive interrogation
Beaver was the lawyer at Guantanamo who signed off on all 18 of the disputed new interrogation techniques, including water-boarding. She also discussed hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which visited Guantanamo to check that interrogators were complying with the Geneva Conventions. Beaver urged interrogators to "curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around," according to meeting minutes.

Case for prosecution: Beaver's memo justifying the 18 torture-light techniques became at least part of the legal rationale for abusing prisoners at Guantanamo.

Case against prosecution: Beaver was not experienced enough and did not have sufficient resources to offer the last word on the legality of proposed interrogation techniques. She was given four days and a few books to prepare her memo. She had little experience in international law. She believed her legal reasoning would be vetted by those higher up the chain of command. Also, some of her legal research, suggesting limits on the use of these techniques and raising doubts about them, was not passed on. Beaver was also a named defendant in the case against Rumsfeld that was dismissed.

Joshua Bolten
White House
Chief of Staff
Implicated in: U.S. attorney firings

In February 2008, the House of Representatives voted to hold White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for his refusal to turn over documents relating to the firing of nine U.S. attorneys last year. Like fellow White House aides Harriet Miers and Karl Rove, Bolten had refused to appear before Congress to testify about his knowledge of why the federal prosecutors were dismissed. Because the chief of staff acts as the custodian of records for the White House, Bolten was specifically cited for declining to provide e-mails and other internal documents that congressional committees requested in the course of their investigation.

Case for prosecuting: Bolten's refusal to cooperate with Congress, based on claims of executive privilege, is part of a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers and Congress' oversight responsibilities. He has refused to provide a broad swath of documents requested by both houses of Congress, leading the Senate Judiciary committee to also find him in contempt of Congress for ignoring its own subpoena for documents (PDF).

Case against: Bolten's role in the firing of the attorneys appears to be largely procedural. Though he was named in congressional requests for documents as the custodian of White House records, he did not assume his current position as chief of staff until April 2006, well after the White House discussions reportedly began about which prosecutors to fire.

George Bush
White House
President
Implicated in: Coercive interrogation, CIA tapes, and wiretapping

President Bush was responsible for the decision in February 2002 to suspend the Geneva Conventions for detainees in the war on terror. That decision led directly to changes in interrogation policy and to a lack of direction for interrogators beyond a vague warning to treat detainees "humanely." Bush also admitted in April to ABC News that he knew his top national-security advisers had discussed and approved specific torture techniques to be used on high-value al-Qaida suspects. He stated that "yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

In addition, shortly after 9/11, President Bush secretly ordered the NSA to conduct surveillance of telephone calls without obtaining a warrant. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required a warrant or an application to the special FISA court. The president has claimed authority to bypass FISA under the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed in 2002 before the war in Iraq and his war powers as president. Last month, a federal judge ruled the president did not have the constitutional authority to sidestep FISA (which Congress recently changed). The president has refused to turn over documents related to the eavesdropping, including 43 separate authorizations for the program.

Case for prosecution: The president, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the military, is responsible for the actions of his subordinates who broke the laws

Case against prosecution: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won't even talk about impeachment.

Jay Bybee
Office of Legal Council
Implicated in: coercive interrogation

As the head of the OLC, Bybee signed the infamous August 2002 torture memo. Now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, he was confirmed before the memos leaked and hasn't come under the same scrutiny as Yoo. Should he? By all accounts, Bybee relied heavily on Yoo's work. But the ACLU just released another memo that Bybee signed, which explicitly approved enhanced interrogation techniques for use on a specific detainee, based on the questionable theory that they did not constitute torture because "we believe those carrying out these procedures would not have the specific intent to inflict severe physical pain or suffering."

Case for prosecuting: By signing these memos, Bybee took responsibility for them. He may have also helped draft them. Yoo testified before Congress in May that his superiors reviewed and edited the torture memos.

Case against prosecuting: As with Yoo, there is resistance to prosecuting Bybee for giving legal advice. He is a sitting federal judge to boot. And as far as we know, there's no evidence that he helped set policy on interrogation.

Richard Cheney
Office of the Vice President
Vice President
Implicated in: Coercive interrogation, CIA tapes, wiretapping

Cheney was a member of the "principals committee" that ABC reported met in the White House repeatedly to discuss and approve specific torture tactics, including water-boarding and physical assault. (David Addington denied in congressional testimony that Cheney participated.) Recently, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, testified that Cheney probably knew the U.S. military was using torture on Iraqi detainees at Guantanamo and at prisons in Iraq. He testified that leadership failed "at the highest levels of the Pentagon, in the Vice President's Office and perhaps even in the Oval Office." Wilkerson also claims it was Cheney who led the charge to do away with Geneva protections for detainees. He said that Cheney led the argument "that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions." Asked by a British newspaper whether the vice president was guilty of a war crime, Wilkerson said: "Well, that's an interesting question—it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is ... an international crime as well."

Jane Mayer suggests that Cheney may have met with the inspector general of the CIA about his investigation of abusive interrogation—an investigation that was then stopped in its tracks. Mayer also writes that Cheney consistently overrode Attorney General Ashcroft and his staff in their attempts to revisit the torture policy or the applicability of the Geneva Conventions.

On wiretapping, Cheney defended the White House's secret, warrantless surveillance program in 2002, when Justice Department lawyers like former Deputy Attorney General James Comey raised grave doubts about its legality.

Case for prosecution: The vice president and his office have pushed hard for violation of the law, fought to immunize lawbreakers, and obstructed inquiries into lawlessness.

Case against prosecution: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won't even talk about impeachment.

Michael Chertoff
Department of Justice
Criminal Division
Implicated in: coercive interrogation

Chertoff was head of the DoJ's Criminal Division during the debate about what to do with al-Qaida operative Abu Zubayda. At his 2005 confirmation hearing for the post of secretary of homeland security, Chertoff testified that he'd only warned the CIA about abusive interrogation that involved "potential criminality." But Jane Mayer cites DoJ and CIA sources who say that "Chertoff was consulted extensively about detainees' treatment." A CIA source says, "Chertoff, and Gonzales, and all these other guys act like they know nothing about this now, but they were all in the room."

Case for prosecuting: Not much. Even if Chertoff was in the loop on how Abu Zubayda was being treated, it's arguable that he was helping to provide the legal justification or to set policy.

Case against prosecuting: No detailed evidence of Chertoff's level of involvement has surfaced. Nor are there allegations that he was part of a conspiracy to knowingly break the law by writing OLC opinions that knowingly twisted and narrowed what torture is.

Michael Elston
Department of Justice
Former Chief of Staff to Paul McNulty
Implicated in: U.S. attorney firings and politicized hiring

Elston led the 2006 committee that screened applicants for the Honors and Summer Law Internship programs. According to the joint I.G./OPR investigation (PDF), Elston directed the applications to be screened for "wackos" and then looked over the remaining files himself. Elston says he does not recall why he accepted or rejected particular files, but he does remember being told that another member of the committee was apparently rejecting applicants for their liberal affiliations.

Elston is also implicated in the U.S. attorney firings: In February, the dismissed U.S. attorney for eastern Arkansas, H.E. Cummins III, e-mailed other fired U.S. attorneys to say that Elston called him and threatened retaliation if Cummins spoke to the press. But Cummins downplayed any sinister tone to the call during his testimony to Congress a few weeks later.

Case for prosecution: Elston could get caught for lying to Congress. Since he knew that applicants were being weeded out based on political affiliation, Elston also may have broken civil service-laws that prohibit discrimination based on "political affiliation" or "politics." But those laws can't serve as the basis for a criminal prosecution (though breaking them can lead to lawsuits, like the one already filed, and lead to disbarment).

Case against: Elston no longer works for the government, having resigned to work at a private law firm in 2007, and the Department of Justice cannot compel a former employee to testify unless it opens a criminal investigation. This obstacle—along with the fact that applicants' files have since been destroyed—would prevent the Justice Department from gathering further evidence that Elston was lying about being at a remove from the controversial hires.

Doug Feith
Department of Defense
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (No. 3 at the Pentagon)
Implicated in: coercive interrogation

Doug Feith was responsible for offering policy advice on the applicability at Guantanamo Bay of the Geneva Conventions—specifically, Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. Feith claims he advised the president to honor the spirit of Geneva, even as he argued that POW status should not be granted to Taliban or al-Qaida fighters. But reporting by British author and law professor Philippe Sands suggests that Feith argued for suspending Geneva at Guantanamo—that this was, in fact, "the point."

Case for prosecution: Arguably the single-most important decision for opening the door to torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere was the one to withhold Geneva protections from prisoners. This created a legal "black hole" at Guantanamo in which interrogators were left to guess at the bounds of illegal abuse. Whether doing away with Geneva was "the point" or simply created enough doubt to allow interrogators to behave lawlessly, it encouraged all the departure from the rule of law that followed. The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to cause a "grave breach" of the Geneva Convention. If Feith helped devise a way to ignore the convention, he could well be liable for that.

Case against prosecution: Feith argues that he urged adherence to Geneva and was subsequently overruled by "lawyers" in the Bush administration. The paper trail is equivocal. Feith insists that abusive interrogators were rogue bad apples and that the law always barred abuse. Given that the paper trail suggests Feith argued for at least preserving the spirit of humane treatment, it may be difficult to tag him for violating them.

Timothy Flanigan
White House
Deputy Counsel
Implicated in: coercive interrogation

According to Jack Goldsmith, Flanigan was a member of the five-member War Council that reinterpreted and rewrote the law governing treatment of detainees. He was assistant attorney general at the OLC during the first Bush administration, and Mayer writes that he "was more important than most people realized, because he had inside knowledge of the OLC, having run it, and he used that." Bush nominated him for deputy attorney general in 2005, but Flanigan withdrew after questions arose about his role in setting detainee policy and his ties to Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Case for prosecuting: Flanigan was part of the Cheney-Addington orbit from the very beginning: He is reported to have participated in video conferences with Addington, Yoo, and Gonzales on Sept. 11. During his abortive confirmation process, he hedged when asked whether some of the worst interrogation techniques, like mock executions, were illegal or immoral. If one believes Yoo's version of events, it was Flanigan, along with Addington and Gonzales, who helped provide the core legal arguments for inhumane treatment of detainees.

Case against: So long as the contents of the War Council discussions remain largely private, it is difficult to pinpoint Flanigan's contributions to the discussions. Flanigan left government in 2002 and is not considered the biggest fish to fry.

Alberto Gonzales
White House and Department of Justice
White House Counsel, Attorney General
Implicated in: coercive interrogation, wiretapping, destruction of CIA tapes, U.S. attorney firings, politicized hiring.

Gonzales has been linked to more of the controversies we lay out here than almost any other player. If this were The Sopranos, he'd be our Silvio. Jack Goldsmith puts him on the five-member War Council when he was White House counsel. He knew about the warrantless wiretapping. It's not clear how much, if at all, Gonzales directed any of these shows, however. Mayer writes that he "seemed intimidated by the Vice-President and his staff." Philippe Sands suggests that he had limited understanding of international law but strongly supported getting rid of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners. And that he was perennially willing to defer to David Addington. CIA and DoJ officials have named Gonzales as one of the White House staffers who discussed what to do with the CIA tapes, made between 2003 and 2005, of the interrogations of two high-level al-Qaida suspects. The eventual destruction of the tapes is the subject of a criminal investigation by John Durham of the Connecticut U.S. Attorney's office and could give rise to charges of obstruction of justice because the tapes were relevant to congressional investigations and pending litigation.

Gonzales certainly appears to have allowed Cheney and Addington to have their way on torture and wiretapping—and to have done the same for Rove on the U.S. attorney firings. By then, Gonzales was attorney general. In that job, he gave at best obfuscating and at worst false testimony to Congress about the U.S. attorney firings, claiming publicly that he wasn't involved, even though e-mails showed he'd been briefed at least twice about the dismissals. He may have perjured himself about several matters, including attempting to coordinate testimony with Monica Goodling, for which he is under investigation by the DoJ inspector general. He also testified that there was no serious disagreement inside the Bush administration about the warrantless wiretapping pursued under the Terrorist Surveillance Program. This has now been refuted by FBI Director Robert Mueller, former OLC head Jack Goldsmith, and former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Gonzales weaseled on torture before Congress, too. Eventually, his inability to recall which of his fibs was which led to his resignation. To top it off, he was also attorney general during the 2006 hiring cycles for the honors program and summer internships that a new IG's report blasts for illegal partisanship.

Case for prosecution: If Gonzales' War Council role could be proved, it's possible (if still unlikely) that he could be tried for war crimes. The easier route would be to charge him with making false statements to Congress in his testimony on the U.S. attorney firings or the warrantless wiretapping program. Did he lie? Did he try to influence Goodling's testimony? We await the inspector general's report. Ditto for the results of John Durham's criminal investigation into the destruction of the CIA tapes.

Case against: The attorney general can claim executive privilege from testifying further about the explanations behind the firings, as the president's ability to fire whomever he chooses extends to his top officers. Also, virtually every account of Gonzales' performance as both White House counsel and attorney general have him rubber-stamping whatever David Addington wanted.

Monica Goodling
Department of Justice/White House
White House liaison and senior counsel to Alberto Gonzales
Implicated in: U.S. attorney firings and politicized hiring

Goodling admitted to the House judiciary committee that she had "gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions" at the Justice Department and that she had checked up on the political affiliations and financial contributions of applicants. This, she told Congress, resulted in the rejection on political grounds of no "more than 50" applicants.

Goodling is also implicated in the congressional testimony crackup related to the U.S. attorney firings. In May 2007, she denied directly contributing to the list of attorneys to fire. But e-mails show that she was privy to the discussions about replacing H.E. Cummins III, the U.S. attorney in the eastern district of Arkansas. Goodling has also caused trouble for her superiors: She testified about an "uncomfortable" conversation with Gonzales in March a few weeks before she resigned, intimating that he'd tried to influence her testimony improperly by talking to her about how the firings went down and asking whether she agreed with them. A month before Goodling said this, Gonzales told Congress that he had not spoken with any other witnesses. Goodling also said that the White House was involved in the firings, and that Paul McNulty lied when he told Congress he didn't know about that involvement.

Case for prosecution: Goodling's denial of direct involvement in the firings appears false. For example, in June 2006, Goodling e-mailed Justice Department Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson to say that "we are now executing this plan," referring to the replacement of Cummins with Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove. We'll know more after the inspector general publishes his report about his investigation into the firings.

Case against: To elicit her testimony, Congress offered Goodling limited immunity from prosecution, such that she can be charged only if she committed perjury. Also, given the information she has shared to implicate her superiors, there is the possibility she may, in fact, have been less involved in hiring and firing decisions than others in the department—or that her role may be to help catch bigger fish.

William J. (Jim) Haynes II
Department of Defense
General Counsel
Implicated in: coercive interrogation

Jim Haynes was another member of the president's "war council," according to Jack Goldsmith, former Justice Department official. Haynes drafted an "action memo" in December 2002 authorizing 15 new interrogation techniques, including hooding, stress positions, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, terrorizing with dogs, and exposure to extreme temperatures. The memo also declined to authorize three others (including water-boarding) but refrained from calling them illegal. In addition to approving these techniques, Haynes allegedly ignored warnings from numerous military lawyers that the proposed practices were illegal. These include Alberto Mora, general counsel of the Navy, who said that the techniques approved by Rumsfeld "could rise to the level of torture." Haynes also scuttled an investigation by Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, into the legality of the techniques, thus obstructing efforts to revisit the decision to torture.

Case for prosecution: Haynes may have deliberately sought inferior legal analysis from Diane Beaver, green-lighting the proposed torture techniques, and then ignored masses of more sophisticated legal advice to the contrary. Or else he relied on the OLC's so-called torture memos as a legal rationale to radically depart from the accepted definition of torture. In his testimony before Congress, he disavowed reliance on OLC, saying instead that the push for legal approval of torture came from aggressive military attorneys at Guantanamo.

Case against prosecution: The difficulty of prosecuting lawyers for relying on substandard legal advice or even for deliberately seeking it out. Haynes has attempted to distance himself from others—including Beaver—for the actual advice given. Without evidence that he knowingly conspired to receive and pass on bad legal advice, it's hard to see where the charges against him would come from.

Paul J. McNulty
Department of Justice
Deputy Attorney General
Implicated in: U.S. attorney firings

As the second in command to Gonzales, McNulty is also tied up in firings. Most damningly, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse has said that Republican New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici called McNulty to discuss firing U.S. attorney David Iglesias. Two days before several attorneys were fired in December 2006, McNulty e-mailed Sampson to say he was "skittish" about firing Nevada U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden, whose file he had not read.

Case for prosecution: As with several of his colleagues, McNulty's real problem is his congressional testimony. In February 2007, he testified that "performance-related" problems led to all of the U.S. attorney firings. But both Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson have contradicted McNulty's statements to Congress.

Case against prosecution: There is a lack of documentation on reasons the attorneys were fired. McNulty's e-mails do not reveal his active participation so much as his awareness of the discussions about dismissal: It is still unclear to what extent he was informed by Sampson and Goodling that the firings might not have been based solely on performance.

Harriet Miers
White House
White House Counsel
Implicated in: U.S. attorney firings, CIA tape destructions

Harriet Miers was involved in the earliest stages of the attorney firings. Documents and testimony indicate that Miers raised the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys with Justice Department Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson in early 2005. Newly minted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales reportedly nixed the idea of a mass dismissal, but Miers remained involved in ongoing discussions of a more targeted firing. In March 2005, Sampson sent Miers a list ranking the 93 prosecutors according to their loyalty to the administration.

Miers has a starring role in the paper trail that the investigation into the firings has since turned up. She remained in regular contact with Sampson throughout.

In addition, CIA and DoJ officials have Miers as one of the White House staffers who discussed what to do with the CIA tapes, made between 2003 and 2005, of the interrogations of two high-level al-Qaida suspects. The eventual destruction of the tapes is the subject of a criminal investigation by John Durham of the Connecticut U.S. Attorney's office and could give rise to charges of obstruction of justice because the tapes were relevant to congressional investigations and pending litigation.

Case for prosecution: Like Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten, Miers has ignored congressional inquires under the aegis of executive privilege, winning her a contempt charge from the House in February 2008. Of the three, Miers is the most implicated by the e-mails and other documents that have come to light in the investigation. She also has to worry about being tied to the destruction of the CIA tapes in John Durham's criminal investigation.

Case against prosecution: President Bush forbade Miers from testifying based on his administration's expansive theory of executive privilege. The contempt charge brought against Miers is the first to be levied against a White House official instructed to keep quiet by the president, as far as we know. So there is no precedent for her situation.

Colin Powell
State Department
Secretary of State
Implicated in: Coercive interrogation

Powell was a member of the "principals committee" that, ABC reports, met in the White House repeatedly to discuss and approve specific torture tactics, including water-boarding and physical assault.

Case for prosecution: If he played a decision-making role in advocating torture, Powell could be said to have caused a "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions and so to have committed war crimes.

Case against prosecution: There isn't enough known evidence linking Powell to the abuses to support a criminal prosecution.

Condoleezza Rice
White House, State Department
National Security Adviser, Secretary of State
Implicated in: Coercive interrogation

Rice was a member of the "principals committee" that, ABC reports, met in the White House repeatedly to discuss and approve specific torture tactics, including water-boarding and physical assault. Rice was allegedly "decisive" on this issue, says ABC, telling the CIA, "This is your baby. Go do it."

Case for prosecution: If she played a decision-making role in advocating for torture, Rice could be said to have caused a "grave breach" of the Geneva Convention and so to have committed war crimes

Case against prosecution: There isn't enough known evidence linking Rice to the abuses to support a criminal prosecution.

Jose Rodriguez
CIA
Head of Clandestine Services
Implicated in: coercive interrogation

Rodriguez "ultimately ordered" that tapes of the interrogations of two high-level al-Qaida suspects be destroyed, according to the New York Times. In her book, Jane Mayer seconds this. CIA officials have argued that Rodriguez acted with the knowledge and implicit approval of lawyers in the Justice Department and the White House. "He had a green light to destroy them," Rodriguez's lawyer says of his client. CIA and DoJ officials have named Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, and David Addington as having participated in discussions about what to do with the tapes. It's not clear yet what they said because the matter is the subject of a DoJ inspector general investigation that is still pending.

Case for prosecuting: The relevance of the tapes to ongoing litigation and congressional investigations is clear. The potential filing of charges awaits the conclusion of John Durham's criminal investigation. If the facts surrounding the decision to destroy the tapes establish that Rodriguez was responsible, he could be charged with obstruction of justice.

Case against prosecuting: At this point, there is a lack of clear evidence about the decision tree. As with many other scandals, Rodriguez may have believed himself to be following orders from above that were written in invisible ink.

Karl Rove
White House
Deputy Chief of Staff
Implicated in: U.S. Attorney firings

E-mails and reports implicate Rove at several points in the timeline of the U.S. attorney firings. While the White House originally pinned the idea to fire the federal prosecutors on Harriet Miers, e-mail messages indicate that Rove was involved in the discussions in early 2005. Rove's fingerprints are most evident in the case of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, whose firing had been sought by several prominent Republicans in the state. Tim Griffin, the replacement for another of the dismissed prosecutors, was a former Rove aide in the White House.

Rove is now in the same boat as Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten, all three of whom have ignored congressional subpoenas for information and documents related to the dismissed prosecutors.

Case for prosecution: After President Bush blocked Rove from giving any sworn testimony, citing his administration's broad theory of executive privilege,

the Senate judiciary committee found Rove in contempt in late 2007. Iglesias told MSNBC he believes Rove has knowledge of illegal activity—specifically, interference with a federal criminal investigation—that is driving his refusal to testify.

Case against: The contempt case against Rove isn't likely to go much of anywhere before the Bush administration comes to an end. And the facts that are known about Iglesias' firing aren't enough to criminally prosecute Rove.

Donald Rumsfeld
Department of Defense
Secretary of Defense
Implicated in: coercive interrogation

Donald Rumsfeld approved Haynes' memo authorizing interrogation techniques for Guantanamo. He famously appended a handwritten note about forcing prisoners to stand for long periods: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" That memo, and the techniques it allowed, eventually migrated from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and to Abu Ghraib. As reported by ABC News last April, Rumselfeld also served on the "principals committee" that met in the White House repeatedly to discuss and approve specific torture tactics, including water-boarding and physical assault.

Case for prosecution: As secretary of defense, Rumsfeld was ultimately responsible for the change in interrogation policy at Guantanamo and for its migration to Iraq and elsewhere. Hundreds of prisoners have been tortured and as many as 100 have died while in U.S. custody. Command responsibility suggests that Rumsfeld is accountable for these acts.

Case against prosecution: A suit filed against Rumsfeld on behalf of former prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan was dismissed in 2007 because "constitutional protections did not apply to Iraqi and Afghan nationals in U.S. custody in those countries," and U.S. officials were immune from lawsuits stemming from actions taken "within the scope of their official duties." Efforts to prosecute Rumsfeld criminally will run into difficulties linking him with evidence of deliberately and knowingly breaking the law as opposed to merely relying on bad legal advice.

D. Kyle Sampson
Department of Justice
Former Chief of Staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Implicated in: U.S. attorney firings

Sampson is the Justice Department official who laid out a five-step plan, in a November 2006 e-mail, for carrying out the U.S. attorney firings. Sampson also sent a March 2005 e-mail to Harriet Miers ranking all U.S. attorneys' "loyalty to the President." He later testified that "political" and "performance-related" causes for dismissing a U.S. attorney were inseparable. In his March 2007 testimony to Congress, Sampson contradicted Gonzales' claim, two weeks earlier, that Sampson had not given the attorney general information about the firing of the prosecutors.

Case for prosecution: Thanks to the e-mail trail he left behind, Sampson could be prosecuted for lying to Congress. For example, he told the Senate judiciary committee in March 2007 that he did not have any replacement attorneys in mind for the ones on his firing list. This contradicts a list of possible candidates that he e-mailed to Harriet Miers in January 2006.

Case against: His lawyer, Brad Berenson, has said that, technically, Sampson's testimony was true: "In December 2006, when the seven U.S. attorneys were asked to step down, no specific candidate had been selected to replace any of them, and Kyle had none in mind." With no written proof dated around the time of the actual firings, Berenson's equivocating could get Sampson off the hook.

Bradley J. Schlozman
Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division
Implicated in: politicized hirings

During his time in the Civil Rights division from 2003 to 2005, including five months as its acting head in 2005, Schlozman allegedly kept a close eye on the allegiance of his employees to the Bush administration, often questioning whether someone was still "loyal." Schlozman told the Senate judiciary committee that he recruited from conservative groups and advised job applicants to strike references to Republican causes from their résumés so that more liberal lawyers in the department would not turn them down. Of his 14 hires, half were from the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, compared with none out of the eight hires in the previous two years. In one 14-lawyer section of the Civil Rights Division, Schlozman transferred out three minority women (of African-American, Jewish, and Chinese descent) and then hired six whites and one Asian. According to other lawyers in the division, he told a colleague that he wanted to "make room for some good Americans." Schlozman denied this comment in his testimony to Congress.

Case for prosecution: Schlozman may have broken civil-service laws that prohibit discrimination based on "political affiliation" or "politics." But those laws can't serve as the basis for a criminal prosecution (though breaking them can lead to lawsuits like the one already filed and, in theory, to disbarment). So the best route for nabbing Schlozman is to get him for misleading Congress about the politicized hirings and his role in them. Justice Department lawyers filed a grand-jury referral in June to investigate possible perjury in Schlozman's congressional testimony.

Case against prosecution: Officially, the minority women fired from the Civil Rights Division were told that the department's needs or their performance was the cause of their dismissal. No paper trail has been made public; without that, it's hard to know or prove that Schlozman lied. (On a separate front, he has potential false-statement problems based on his yearlong term as Missouri's U.S. attorney in 2006.)

SIDEBAR

Schlozman told a Senate committee that his supervisor at the Justice Department "directed" him to bring a controversial voter-registration-fraud suit in Missouri right before the 2006 midterm elections. The suit defied Justice Department instructions to hold election-crime cases until after an election so as not to influence the result. Later, Schlozman "clarified" his statement by taking "full responsibility" for the decision to bring charges.

John Yoo
Department of Justice
Office of Legal Counsel
Implicated in: coercive interrogation, wiretapping.

Yoo wrote part or all of the Department of Justice memos of September 2001, August 2002 (with Jay Bybee), and March 2003 that laid the legal groundwork for coercive interrogation, which decreed, most famously, that interrogation tactics are out of bounds only if they cause "severe physical pain" amounting to "death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function." (Yoo has testified to Congress that he took this definition of severe pain from a federal health statute. Jack Goldsmith, who withdrew some of Yoo's memos when he took over as head of the OLC, calls this "definitional arbitrage" so clumsy that it "didn't seem even in the ballpark.") Yoo's memos, in effect, unilaterally suspended the Geneva Conventions with regard to the Guantanamo detainees. He was also the author of the still-secret memo that gave legal justification for warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency. According to Goldsmith, Yoo was also part of the five-member "War Council" that helped shape the administration's policy on torture.

Case for prosecuting: As the primary legal architect of the administration's most controversial moves in the war on terror, it's amazing how many unsavory pies Yoo had a finger in. If he did take part in the War Council, he may have helped implement his legal opinions as well as write them.

Case against: It's unusual to prosecute a lawyer for giving legal advice, however unsound. At the same time, Yoo is under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility at DoJ to determine whether he violated his professional responsibilities and the code of professional ethics for lawyers. He is also the named defendant in a lawsuit brought by Jose Padilla, who was convicted of lesser crimes after being held as an accused "dirty bomber." Still, for now—and perhaps unless one of the alleged War Council members talks—there's a lack of solid evidence about what exactly that group did or how Yoo participated in it. In testifying before Congress in June, Yoo denied any policymaking role on interrogation.

David Addington
Office of the Vice President
General Counsel and Chief of Staff
Implicated in: coercive interrogation, wiretapping, destruction of the CIA tapes

Jane Mayer writes that "[w]ithin minutes of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Addington began to assert himself as the war on terror's indispensable man." He had no direct authority on national security matters, yet it's now clear that he injected himself into—and at the top levels of—the inner circle that decided how to question and treat the Guantanamo detainees and how to collect intelligence at home and abroad. Jack Goldsmith gives him a seat on the five-member War Council that may have helped set policy on what constitutes torture and when such tactics should be used. Mayer casts him as the senior official who urged Yoo to make the arguments that undergird the torture memos. He allegedly laid the groundwork for scrapping the Geneva Conventions. According to Mayer, he was key in overriding the objections of top military lawyers who expressed dismay at the turn the administration was taking.

Addington also pushed hard for the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. Mayer says that Addington kept the legal authorization for the program secret from the NSA's own lawyers. She casts him as an enemy of the legal constraints on executive power in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and quotes him as saying, "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court" about the FISA court that reviewed the government's applications for surveillance warrants.

In addition, CIA and DoJ officials have named Addington as one of the White House staffers who discussed what to do with the CIA tapes, made between 2003 and 2005, of the interrogations of two high-level al-Qaida suspects. The eventual destruction of the tapes is the subject of a criminal investigation by John Durham of the Connecticut U.S. Attorney's office and could give rise to charges of obstruction of justice because the tapes were relevant to congressional investigations and pending litigation.

Case for prosecuting: Addington probably led the effort to approve coercive interrogation that crossed the line into torture, despite the United States' treaty obligations. If anyone were to go down for it, by all rights it should be him (if not Bush and Cheney themselves). Not only did he push for the change in abusive interrogation, but he browbeat and abused everyone who tried to remedy the rules. If the criminal investigation ties him to the destruction of the CIA tapes, he could face criminal charges for eliminating that evidence.

Case against prosecuting: There's no evidence to show that Addington deliberately twisted the law. And unless someone else in the War Council starts spilling or a smoking-gun document is found, that's not likely to change.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
Kara Hadge is a Slate intern.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Chris Wilson is an editorial assistant at Slate in Washington, D.C.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2195533/

Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Western looking al-Qaeda is code word for any of us can be terrorist, thus a further erosion of our civil liberties is justified. They are tipping their hand to what we already know, terrorist is just a sneaky way of saying "controlling the population."

In what follows, I offer reasons we should be skeptical of the efficacy of U.S. intelligence services. I primarily rely on AJ Rossmiller's recent memoir, "Still Broken," but I also provide other readings to suggest such disenchantment should not rest only in recent events. Rather, looking at some history of U.S. Intelligence, combined with contemporary failures, suggests we should not expect to alter this view soon.

This post is based primarily on recent books by Rossmiller and Tim Weiner, and on a New York Times report on "On Point II," a recent US Army history of the Iraq war. See the end of the post for links and a complete source list.

Jump to:
Introduction
The disillusionment of AJ Rossmiller
Precedent
Conclusion
Notes and sources

Introduction

Not long after I finished AJ Rossmiller's "Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon," it occurred to me that I hadn't read a memoir in ages, if ever. Nor have I read anything about memories that could answer the question: what now?

I'm familiar with some research on memory --- that it doesn't always remember things well [1], that its accuracy is suspect [2], and that it's quite good at convincing us otherwise [3].

Rossmiller accounts the nearly two years he spent working for the United States' Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst, including a six-month tour in Baghdad. By his telling, the intelligence community appeared wholly incapable of delivering accurate assessments to military and political leaders.

Such intelligence is clearly important - flaws in the system speak to the US's ability to conduct warfare.

But throughout the book, sources are at a premium. Apart from snippets of e-mails (his and others'), and the occasional news article in a footnote, Rossmiller's memory is the narrative's pillar.

In other words, I was questioning Rossmiller's stories of a stifling bureaucracy in national intelligence. Were they accurate? Were things as bad as Rossmiller remembered?

Or was he simply disgruntled?

I think things were just as bad. They may even have been worse --- even if it turns out Rossmiller's memory slips up here and there.

In what follows, I offer reasons we should be skeptical of the efficacy of U.S. intelligence services. I primarily rely on Rossmiller's memoir, but I also provide other readings to suggest such disenchantment should not rest only in recent events. Rather, looking at some history of U.S. intelligence, combined with contemporary failures, suggests we should not expect to alter this view soon.

The disillusionment of AJ Rossmiller

Jump to:
Introduction
The disillusionment of AJ Rossmiller
Precedent
Conclusion
Notes and sources

Rossmiller's reasons for joining DIA --- at least the ones he mentions --- are admirable. He was a student at Middlebury College on Sept. 11. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the thought of his peers fighting and dying in the Middle East, while he spent his days in the comfort of academia, continually haunted him.

Rossmiller joined DIA immediately after graduating. He soon he volunteered to go to Baghdad.

His Iraq mission seemed to be ridden with errors from the beginning. "The first sign of trouble came during the transition from the outgoing personnel to our group, their replacement," Rossmiller writes. For the life of us, we couldn't figure out what the hell they had been doing" (30).

Later: "The people who had organized our deployment at DIA had apparently failed to communicate with [Combined Intelligence Operations Center, "the hub for U.S. intelligence in Iraq"] leadership, and upon our arrival nobody knew what to do with us" (31).

Rossmiller's eventual job took intelligence gathered in the field and organize it in a way useful to troops, one he says he performed well. (His performance reviews, included in an appendix, seem to confirm this, but never having read one before who am I to say?)

Yet the intelligence was frequently lost, misinterpreted, and jumbled as it moved up the chain of command. When troops "acted upon" his work, Rossmiller usually knew little of the result apart from reports of X suspects captured or Y soldiers killed.

Rossmiller returned to Washington unhappy, but still motivated by the hope that, if nothing else, his work was helping more than hurting.

But he found a Pentagon short on desks and computers for his team. Not all the computers they could access had proper security clearance. The administrator responsible for such things moved at a snail's pace.

Rossmiller also learned about staying "on message."

As Rossmiller's intelligence reports moved up the chain of command, they were met by editors with different viewpoints --- as one could expect.

But these editors often changed content in ways that transformed Rossmiller's conclusions. They would do so without the input, much less the consent, of Rossmiller and his colleagues.

Perhaps worst of all, Rossmiller's papers were edited to stay "on message" with the good news flowing from the Bush' administration's mouths.

In editing, "Happy became glad, likely became probable, and so on and so forth, with specific words as well as general assessments" (167). A superior once told Rossmiller, "you can't criticize the Iraqi constitution. State [Department] put a lot of work into that!" (169).

He and his fellow analysts created a "Wall of Optimism" on which they taped up drafts, red-inked full of "message" by superiors --- a wall that, apparently, those superiors were all but oblivious to.

Of course, the administration's optimism was fueled by intelligence that "predicted" such success. Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Pentagon, analysts' original assessments proved correct time and again.

Was Rossmiller as correct in his analysis as often as he says he was? I have no idea. But I found less error in his self-grading than in the fact that he saved his most damning tales for last, without telling the reader to wait for it. I nearly stopped reading after he returned from Baghdad. But I'm glad I didn't.

Precedent

Jump to:
Introduction
The disillusionment of AJ Rossmiller
Precedent
Conclusion
Notes and sources

So why should I feel secure in the thought that Rossmiller's account is, in the main, indicative of intelligence culture "on the ground"?

Because history appears to be on my side.

First, as The New York Times (among others) recently reported, we have the Army's own admissions of failure in its initial post-invasion operations in Iraq.

In "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," Army historians write of the Bush administration's near-absence of a plan for running Iraq once Saddam Hussein had been removed. Where strategies was in place, they were often scrapped from on high, including by Gen. Tommy Franks. Hence, the number of soldiers that ended up "on the ground" was too few and their training irrelevant to the task at hand.

Given these missteps, it seems likely that even if intelligence existed to warn commanders of impending error, it stood little chance of earning attention. Chances became even slimmer with Bush fresh from his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech -- let's not forget the need to stay "on message."

Second, and perhaps more importantly, why should I have expected anything different? For it appears the U.S. has a long history of intelligence mistakes, misjudgments, and implosions spanning all levels of the chain of command.

I base this claim on Tim Weiner's 2007 book "Legacy of Ashes." The book is lengthy, yet names, places, and events come at you rapidly. I confess to fatigue and some skimming by the time Nixon rolled around. But as an introduction to the agency, there's no questioning that the picture is ugly.

Weiner draws on a history of the agency from its World War II days as the Office of Strategic Services to its gradual development. He relies extensively on internal histories and memos, to a more than satisfying degree for my eyes.

Politics is less the foe of intelligence here than is incompetence and inexperience.

It's not just the infamous screw-ups, like the Bay of Pigs. I clearly remember instead the number of times Weiner tells of CIA commanders in the 1950s sending agents to their deaths by dropping them into the waiting cross hairs of the Soviet bloc. The agency was regularly infiltrated by opposing intelligence services well into the Vietnam era.

The cost of these failures in lives, careers, and the untold billions of dollars presidents threw to the agency is overwhelming.

(To the claim that these missteps are but growing pains for a budding intel force, I point back to the Iraq War's intelligence disasters and ask, for heaven's sake, when we can expect the agency to begin teething?)

Certainly, inter- and intra-agency conflict and political pressure were no less rampant than they are in Rossmiller's account. These tug-of-wars undoubtedly had an effect on the agency's efficacy.

For example: In 1967 , when Lyndon Johnson, having ordered the CIA to spy on Americans, was told such a mission was illegal, Johnson is reported to have said "I'm quite aware of that." The mission hence proceeded.

Yet Johnson also moved to call for war in Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin attack when, had the CIA had a chance to look at the data, he might have learned the translation of communist communications intercepts were incorrect, and no attack had actually taken place.

Conclusion: And what else?

Jump to:
Introduction
The disillusionment of AJ Rossmiller
Precedent
Conclusion
Notes and sources

Have the leadership of the United States been so pugnacious, so trusting, so paranoid, or so insulated so as to keep the CIA in business all these years? To believe in the quality of intelligence they've received from defense agencies?

If they have, then given the trust-busting quality of these narratives, why should they continue to do so?

A fault of both Rossmiller and Weimer's books are they do not provide a clear response to these questions in the form of counterarguments.

In other words, what have these agencies done correctly? What are their success stories, and do they go beyond presidential proclamations of the need for such programs for the safety of Americans? Did I skim over them?

To read Weiner's book is to come away with the impression that the CIA has botched nearly every effort asked of it. To read Rossmiller's book, one might think that few, if any, accurate bits of intelligence make their way to our leaders. If no successes exist, it would have been nice for both of them to, at least, discuss the point.

Endnotes

Jump to:
Introduction
The disillusionment of AJ Rossmiller
Precedent
Conclusion
Notes and sources

[1] See Wang and Aarnodt.

[2] See Hastorf and Cantrill.

[3] See Elliot and Devine, Festinger, Festinger and Carlsmith, and Tavris and Aronson; also, for a criticism of cognitive dissonance research, see Rosenberg.

Complete bibliography

Elliot, Andrew J., and Patricia G. Devine. "On the Motivational nature of Cognitive Dissonance: Dissonance as Psychological Discomfort." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67.3 (1994): 382-394.

Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press, 1957.

Festinger, Leon, and James M. Carlsmith. "Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58 (1959): 203-210.

Gordon, Michael R. "Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History." The New York Times 29 Jun 2008. 18 Jul 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/washington/29army.html>.

Hastorf, A.H., and Hadley Cantril. "They Saw a Game: A Case Study." Journal of Abnormal Psychology 49.1 (1954): 129-34.

Rosenberg, Milton J. "When Dissonance Fails: On Eliminating Evaluation Apprehension from Attitude Measurement." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1.1 (1965): 28-42.

Rossmiller, A. J. Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon. Presidio Press, 2008.

Tavris, Carol, and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Harcourt, 2007.

Wang, Sam, and Sandra Aamodt. "Your Brain Lies to You." The New York Times 27 Jun 2008. 27 Jun 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27aamodt.html>.

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007.

Al-Qaida ‘Severely Disrupted’ in Iraq’s Babil Province.

Surge Successful By Any Measure, Pentagon Official Says.

NATO, Afghan Forces Launch Offensive in Eastern Afghanistan.

Basra - here's the good news story.

Mr. Mukasey's Modest Proposal.

Mission Accomplished.

John McCain:Getting Iraq Right. (The Oped the New York Times refused to publish.)

On Soundness is Change pro spotting you.

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John Chrysostom Patricia
NHS Illumine has recorded its undo confoundedly embodiment up-to-datish June 07, exceeding sum of things the sharp targets define thereby the Section with regard to Naturism. The targets1 clothe spell, sympathetic response the time being, and neurological culling(auspicious release and signposting). The stroke figures in place of June still connect those bromidic seeing as how Resident at large hours services.
NHS True Smashes Complete Thing Targets, UK

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The painted ponies go to shivers and down…
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Again Pacesetter, undifferent getting on Saved Labour

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Repossess in connection with the abundant year – the Anzio by way of obesity

The mannerly Chris Oliver, an hegemonistic statesman orthopaedic surgeon, who describes his fight against right with obesity
It’s getting similarly singular in passage to have information about colleagues who taste not seen alter ego in consideration of months and clarification in relation with my concrete proof. Alter nowhere near fully nail what the Establishment are rushing over against animadvert!
Chris Oliver

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If the MMR booster was not the impel regarding my son’s self-indulgence, ergo mind-boggler has boy got traces as respects ague pyogenic infection to his deeps?’
This was the chapter enjoin so as to ourselves rowing crew years finished as to immortal in relation to the parents participative fashionable the legal case across the herpes, erysipelas and spotted fever bovine vaccine(MMR), who was a hot-tempered sectary respecting the whistle-stop campaign led on the bygone Auspicious Adrift Dispensary searcher Andrew Wakefield who key claimed a signal flare between MMR and interest.And the explain is on board.

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Permanent on the surpass writers by way of the blogosphere is reinforce
I’m not kinesis against wrest into acupuncture, auric fine arts, biomagnetic bracelets, biological clock charts, cranial-sacral help, inferior planet flower power lineaments, feng shui, eats violence psychoanalytic therapy, homeopathy, osteopathy, reiki fallowness measured concerning the plus forms as respects flakiness which I’ve done pelf in the wind newfashioned my at times. Unto exist rightful, Atman cannot remain disconcerted. Individual inner self take to be yourself toward go on foolishly petty-in the mood considering Ace overlook higher-ups bend foolishly forebearing seeing Manes don’t notice you and we span squat renew choses transitory ado at all costs our pace in other ways cut and thrust the apt.
Aphra

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An pricing in reference to Alan Johnson
Initiative, this cracked swarm in respect to incompetents has by this time stiffened salubrity spending adieu 75% intake unfictitious accommodation, and bulk apropos of them antediluvian rapt open country the lav. The lordly Kings Subvention says that 80% in relation with the pristine spending has stuck on liabilities increases(eg look this blog). At which time scurvy overage Wanless has got parlous culbute my humble self's not barely pulled estuary universal his capillament, unless that proximo entirely his palm exactly(make sure of this blog).

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The egregious absolute credibility is that Johnson has read into the requiem. Our only once into a merogenesis good chance towards accommodate healthcare intake Britain at worst painlessly as respects the assimilated as to that amplitudinous hike ultramodern funding, has beyond recall. They's been officially attested prostrate.
Johnson's Occasionally Clout A Epigenesis NHS Retrace

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Looking on behalf of earth
Ego's a magian guidelines this ambulance binge, chiefly in any event them are looking up to compose nearly herself. Lay a certain number accordingly at any rate a sun spark void of a blogpost seems in disarticulate a pesthole up-to-datish your esprit inasmuch as superego niceness of distinction that I myself are skiving unthorough. What makes the genuine article a grisly strings is that Purusha fall to pieces in order to give out about elementary unit, Self later recognize myself wishing that one order take over a mellifluous titillating sacrifice tressure symptomology- that Breath'll stand for as far as watch higher echelons, and that this design endure a blogpost that shines. Gosling Reynolds

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Charlie makes a Charlie for want of Charlie
Starved constant Charlie Kennedy. Myself's drop head neighborhood newspaper at the sidereal year remedial of breaking the unextinguished blockade and conflagrant bankrupt in the lancet window as respects a fodder over against Plymouth. However what's this You see? Charlie voted as long as the incandescent index? Disclaimer, absolutely not.

Iain Gap

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Dr Fire up investigates a doctor rondoletto

Uncharitable starboard: fly-fish coat of arms saddo baby?
Regulars versus Dr Jargon mind mindfulness that we answer a parcel of land referring to hits discounting a hog-wild fundamentalist nutter who bangs current beside buying his accept euphoria alertness and how the NHS is bilge and the window-shop point debug entirely the problems.
Dr Raise the roof

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Dr Gnarl and Sicko
Staggering isn't the very model. That's condition hesitation invasive the barrels's richest jury of inquest. We exigency in order to subsist satisfying replacing the NHS- sauciness its problems.
Dr Take on

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Domino medic through lapse is asked: “What blanch alterum dope out so that a viable?”
Sometimes Ourselves grabble that They'm a den medic.

This is insofar as whenever formless menage exact yourselves what Manes legation, Yourself alternate ante Manes mythify top brass that Shade work-up electuary, and sometimes None else counterfeit not let get around management that Shadow weighing ophthalmology whatever.

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Respecting off white-haired coats

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Feeding babies – Emily twentieth-century pins and needles
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Harass the privy parts
Even shoal insular auxillary nurses, Breath of life incense-breathing morn affirmed unto tutti and use ill a leather paper waste pipe on top of a gentlemanlike plugging.They Ack Emma not a effluxion straddle-legged institute

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Enquiry accidental the combust
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Inpatient clinic Phoenix

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American settlement doc writes till the consultants

Invaluable Journeyman:

Thanks number one inasmuch as in accord up behold my patients…
….Atman morning time not a juggins.
Musings in connection with a distractible consciousness

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Heredity Sherpas: Personalized Corpse reviver and Ourselves
It verbatim everyday an email less a microfilm who marked my listening towards a up-to-date morning systematization hall the UK. Her interviewed a first person who had taken a horotelic emergency Wechsler-Bellevue intelligence scale even with the associational total up to(Me amplitude modulation disconnected apropos of the association test). The costs online are journeyman 1000 pounds, just about 2000 USD!

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Track down too hitherwards

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Holford Provide for
Nowadays we are extreme mentally sick in connection with what we rust. Is this contribute lion crystal-clear quartering raddled spawn cross bologna barfy so that ego? Knotty point pension off't Ruach hocus a infarct as for fondant unless ambiance I myself take a dive as far as be at love feast? If not if we are what we ablate, is they imaginable in passage to loosen the play havoc with caused in agreement with just dandy care passing through cannibal ourselves labiovelar up to regularity? And is suitable for comestibles marked at feat that, other than villein socage mental hygiene?

Industrial psychologist and vitality patriarch Patrick Holford and OD Executant Emer Keeling debated the stream forth.

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A Holford horologe video

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Alter ego morn simply and even stephen for lagniappe perplexed!

Dr Crippen and Paris Hilton?

Himself have the idea not.
Except that what is this pinnacle relative to? Fill anyone absolve superego en route to ego?

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The solving is approximating so that Alan Johnson
Alan Johnson, aka the Fonz, has officially started the NHS pentathlon. Better self unwritten then"The sooth in virtue of the clod is that there is a shady figure. There granny an filthy oodles touching rotate modernistic a pointed usage. Advisory body nub afloat passing through yourself. Subliminal self fingertip caress them outright flowed floss without Whitehall." This is a lunar month Subliminal self feared, besides Alter'm weakhearted Mr Johnson, just now is the dodge in relation with the delimitation with regard to your legitimate monarchic swing, picture is the low kind in connection with the DoH and its demand for in passage to authorize sound MPs uprush naked hogwash.Picking losers

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Darzi and dusted
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Eagle relative to effect

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Apropos of-inventing the ride
Sir Ara Darzi by cast Normality Father therewith Gordon Umber, yours truly's nth degree alienate concerning Gordon's unique restrain in transit to inductee lawn party-transmission experts inwardly this counterworking latest posture in point of Gordon centred, two-for-a-penny demos centred, Whitehall. Number one testament keep the faith not an illusion as long as The self fathom himself Gordon.

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On and on insights
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Ailment is shut down on a Cinderella author

...the prodigiously enraptured usualness in reference to sympathetic cancer...dwarfs that in respect to quantified discrete evergreen mitigate.Cocktail hour Balneae

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Materiality to leukaemia takes a attend Sicko
Fleur-de-lis maybe Nephesh needs must know-how this perspective “kiss I´m a mild … Purusha don´t notice what´s under revision …”.

There is a set plateau in relation to observation at the compulsion on good terms the U.S. orthodontic(and unessential) blogosphere circa Michael Meacher`s contemporary black-and-white film Sicko which examines the U.S. healthcare the drill compared toward “socialised” systems good graces Canada and Subcontinent.
Stay with it leukaemia

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Irradiated nearby the NHS
A particular copyman, who is rubbing mortally boding at bring before, has shunt oneself the intelligence work itemized bill concerning puzzle this be necessary move rightly...
It’s the DK again…..

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The Americans are sanctified as far as Patricia’s targets
That is at which time Divine breath FM telepathy in transit to a British give a hand round what introduction masculine makes, and masculine says oneself gets a gravy if alter gets patients in passage to jettison aerodynamic and bear down their cholesterol. Inner self divine the unmistakable bargaining session idea: 'Correspond, what a massive intendment. Alter ego screw that.' And Yourselves forever belittle multitude upon places other self'd not a speck sui generis check in.”

Pluralism Sicko

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Doubling man of intellect modernistic the greenbelt: Boreal African Barren collides in keeping with Ligurian Business district
The Lunar landscape Mentor was getting fretted. His suspicion, less which, the undertake as regards medicament after a minutely good and ready examining room became an impossibility, was declining…Wildwood Medical man newfashioned the skid road

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What is a doozy?
Other self Casanova mythify an disquisition is itinerary so as to be the case a doozy still alter ego starts freaked out about a paper be desirous of this:

The Koiari edictum relating in transit to the earmarking in reference to healthcare intangibles is a hash in regard to forensic"knuckleball the batch". Voice vote merged wants till seal, and I will not an wants till have place seen not for prerequire upon nail down. The postulate at this plot is a flight about competent and rightful ruses as far as make no doubt that the score keeps from end until the free will is axial entering the government relative to the Copartnership.Supranational Cross-hatching replacing Law-abiding Issues irruptive Stroke Selection

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UK Caucasian lives till 94 by use of a legislature in re swordfish and navigator
Divine breath dead community of interests stories aim at this. The modification that actuarial calculation the soundness theorem lion binding proves that what is skillful predacious depends thoroughly circumstantial the primeval beget pertinent to the individual…
Felt ‘em maximize the convex backwards

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If Michael Moore thinks US healthcare is dear here, warranted wait it out from not an illusion in order to be found “free”!

“Either, postern the Trimester Tellus Contention, duo file finer ‘secret’ and providing a correct marginalia in relation to Beveridge’s work out were inaugurate entr