Torture, Lies and E-Mail

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

In light of the fact that as more information comes out about torture, we need to go back in time to see how Cheney started the cover-up.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Karl Rove and dozens of other White House staffers appear to have illegally routed official e-mails through a Republican group that subsequently deleted them, a congressional report said on Monday.

By using Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business, senior White House aides may have broken a law requiring them to preserve presidential records, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in an interim report.

“This should be a matter of grave concern for anyone who values open government and the preservation of an accurate historical record,” said committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires White House officials to save official correspondence. While the White House automatically archives its e-mail the RNC typically deletes messages on its server older than 30 days, the report said.

That was the Reuters report dated Jun 18 2007.

The Bush administration was one of criminality from day one.  But, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld learned from their days with Richard Nixon; never leave evidence of your crime, always deny involvement, and when all else fails run out the clock.  If John McCain had won the 2008 election, Bush and Cheney would have gotten away with it all.  And they still might.

The lost e-mail scandal came to light over the firing of Attorney General’s who wouldn’t bring bogus charges, in purely political prosecutions, against Democratic politicians in key states.  However, with the information coming forth that Dick Cheney engineered a regime of torture, the lost White House e-mails from the Bush administration takes on an even more sinister face.

The AP failed to mention that Connell was also the chief architect of George W. Bush election websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com — the primary email account used by Karl Rove during his tenure as Senior White House Advisor. Connell’s company, GovTech Solutions, was responsible for building and managing congressional email servers and firewalls, including websites for the House Judiciary Committee, Financial Services, Ways and Means and Administration Committees. Connell also managed the servers for former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell in 2004.

Mike Connell had also been subpoenaed to testify in an Ohio lawsuit regarding his knowledge of vote rigging and the outsourcing of the vote count to Smart Tech servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee before they were rerouted back to Blackwell’s office during the 2004 election. The same SmartTech servers were also used to run Connell’s GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com websites.

From the outing of a CIA agent (Valerie Plame), the politicization of the Department of Justice, the secret energy task force that looked into Iraq’s oil reserve fields, the firing of Attorney General’s who wouldn’t abuse their powers to help the GOP, illegal wiretapping, the evisceration of the Constitution, and the lies told to invade Iraq, the Bush administration had to keep their communications, thus, the evidence, from any prying eyes.  And, with the torture regime, it only got worse.  Is it any wonder now that the Bush administration “lost” millions of e-mails over their 8 years in office?  Maybe someone should take another look into the death of Mike Connell, the GOP’s Information Technology guru.

In February 1971, President Nixon began secretly taping conversations and telephone calls in several locations, including the Oval Office, his office in the Old Executive Office Building, the Cabinet Room, and Camp David.

There are 2,217 hours of tapes containing conversations from February 1971 through July 1973 open to the public.

Those same tapes were used as evidence against Richard Nixon, prompting his resignation before he was impeached, and, Gerald Ford’s pardon for the criminal acts perpetrated by the Nixon administration — an administration that included Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.  Want to guess about the e-mails George W. Bush made sure got “lost” now?

May 7, 1987 — William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence until last February, whose role in the Iran-contra affair is under scrutiny in Congress, died of pneumonia yesterday in Glen Cove Community Hospital on Long Island. He was 74 years old. Mr. Casey died less than 24 hours after the first witness in Congressional hearings on the affair named him as having assisted in providing arms to Nicaraguan rebels after Congress forbade such support.

Before joining the Reagan Administration, Mr. Casey, a Queens-born lawyer, had been chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and an Under Secretary of State. He was a key campaign adviser to Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Casey suffered two seizures and was hospitalized in Washington last Dec. 15, the day before he was to testify to a Senate panel about the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the sale of American arms to Iran. Surgery for Brain Tumor

He underwent surgery three days later for removal of a malignant brain tumor, and it was later reported that he had been under treatment for cancer of the prostate gland for months. After several weeks in the hospital, Mr. Casey resigned his C.I.A. post.

Dennis Connors, a vice president at the Glen Cove hospital, issued a statement yesterday saying, ”The immediate cause of death was aspiration pneumonia as a result of a central nervous system lymphoma.” Mr. Casey was admitted to the hospital April 25.

The diagnosis of aspiration pneumonia could mean, among various possibilities, that Mr. Casey had inhaled food or food particles into his lungs that set up a toxic chemical reaction, a physician not connected with the case said yesterday. A central nervous system lymphoma is a rare tumor of the brain and central nervous system, evidently the brain tumor for which Mr. Casey had surgery late last year at Georgetown Hospital in Washington.

William J. Casey.  CIA Director who was central to Iran-Contra.  Resigned as Director December 1986 due to terminal cancer and is hospitalized.  Suffered seizures two days before the Iran-Contra hearings begin and dies shortly thereafter.  Seems William J. Casey kept his medical problems a secret from America.  Of course, George H.W. Bush pardoned the rest.

The CIA started torturing prisoners in 2001-2, under George Tenet.  Continued torturing prisoners under Porter Goss.  Cheney wanted the CIA to be able to continuing torturing prisoners under Michael Hayden.  I guess CIA Directors just have “bad luck” under GOP Presidents, don’t they, being “forced” to do all sorts of illegal things.  Luckily, the CIA Director’s under George W. Bush didn’t die, but then, none of them were about to testify either.

Guess who was part of the Reagan administration, as well?  Donald Rumsfeld.  Dick Cheney was in Congress and was trying to defend the Reagan administration.

And now, under George W. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney reared their ugly heads again, and, once again, the crimes were flying fast and furious in a Republican presidency.  Are we surprised?  Hardly.

For nearly two years, a young political aide sought to cultivate a “farm system” for Republicans at the Justice Department, hiring scores of prosecutors and immigration judges who espoused conservative priorities and Christian lifestyle choices.

That aide, Monica M. Goodling, exercised what amounted to veto power over a wide range of critical jobs, asking candidates for their views on abortion and same-sex marriage and maneuvering around senior officials who outranked her, including the department’s second-in-command.

An extensive report by the department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility concluded yesterday that Goodling and others had broken civil service laws, run afoul of department policy and engaged in “misconduct,” a finding that could expose them to further scrutiny and sanctions. The report depicted Goodling as a central figure in politicizing employment decisions at Justice during the Bush administration.

Goodling declined to cooperate with investigators, who instead interviewed 85 witnesses and scoured documents and computer hard drives to prepare their report. Last year, she trembled as she told the House Judiciary Committee that she “crossed the line” by asking improper questions of job seekers to gauge their political leanings.

This is exactly why President Obama trying to turn a blind eye to the crimes committed by Bush and Cheney are a disgrace.  Monica Goodling is simply another Rumsfeld waiting to happen in a future Republican presidency because she was allowed to walk out of office without charge, without repercussion, for her crimes just like Rumsfeld did under three Republican presidencies.

Lawrence Wilkerson has spoken out about Guantanamo and now the , yet, President Obama has put on blinders.  Eric Holder is holding his ears screaming LALALALALALALA.  Both think that the evil is behind us, but, we all know that without consequence, those who have committed crimes while in office in the past without consequence have merely waited for their next chance, and, it invariably came.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi promised Wednesday that when her party takes over, the new majority will not attempt to remove President Bush from office, despite earlier pledges to the contrary from others in the caucus.

“I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said during a news conference.

And they didn’t.  George W. “smirking” Bush walked out of office with simply the knowledge that his presidency was one of the worst in our history.

4,294 confirmed deaths in the Iraq War.

WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Americans are less safe now that President Barack Obama has overturned Bush terrorism-fighting policies and that nearly all the Republican administration’s goals in Iraq have been achieved.

NEARLY.  The Iraq government still hasn’t totally given over their reserve oil fields to western oil companies.  NEARLY, Dick.  But, let’s talk about that torture to justify the invasion of Iraq itself.

    what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

   So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

   There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

And, sure enough, Al-Libi, the man who, under torture, gave Cheney that false confession, simply “committed suicide” right before he could be interviewed without being tortured in a Libya prison.

If George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made sure that all of their communications during their criminal acts were deleted, is it any wonder that the CIA deleted all of its records as well, to the point, that they had to make new memorandums on who got briefed on what from memory?  Remember, they destroyed all of the videotapes of the torture, as well?  And, we know now that those memorandums from memory are false, because Bob Graham kept notes on every minute of his day in a notebook.

Are we going to get that closer look into Connell’s death?  Don’t hold your breath… it doesn’t work while being waterboarded anyway.