Panetta’s Defense of CIA Interrogators Undercut by New DoJ Disclosures

by Jason Leopold,

Antemedius, April 14, 2009 – 2:22pm

  CIA Director Leon Panetta has consistently stated over the past several months that agency interrogators who participated in the Bush administration’s sadistic torture practices should not be subject to “any investigation, let alone prosecution,” because they were following legal advice provided by the Justice Department.

   In March, Panetta said he agreed to cooperate with a Senate Intelligence Committee “review” and “study” on CIA interrogation methods on the condition that he received assurances from committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Republican Co-Chair Kit Bond (R-Missouri) that they would not attempt to “punish those who followed guidance from the Department of Justice.”

   “That is only fair,” Panetta said. “Their goal is to draw lessons for future policy decisions” and [they] won’t seek to punish those who participated in the program.

   On Thursday, in announcing the closure of the “black site” prisons where the torture took place, Panetta said CIA “officers who act on guidance from the Department of Justice – or acted on such guidance previously – should not be investigated, let alone punished. This is what fairness and wisdom require.”

   However, Panetta’s defense was dealt a serious blow last week when the Justice Department revealed in a letter sent to a federal court judge that 92 interrogation videotapes the CIA destroyed were made between April and December 2002.

   The Justice Department’s legal opinion authorizing the CIA to use specific interrogation methods, including the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding, was not issued until August 1, 2002.

[snip]

Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population? – Alternet

The last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed us toward the ultimate tipping point.

Poor prognosis for our planet – Sydney Morning Herald

The world has about a decade left to sort out the climate-change mess. John Collee sees lessons from his medicine days as parallels for the future of our planet.

Every patient with an incurable illness will ask how long they have to live. The answer goes something like this: “No one can say how long you may live, because every individual is different, but focus on the changes you observe and be guided by those. When things start changing for the worse, expect these changes to accelerate. So the changes that have occurred over a year may advance by the same degree in a few months, then in weeks. And that is how you can judge when the end is coming.”

Breaking the silence about Spring – RealClimate

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring – in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.

Ice loss sparks new climate change fears – Financial Times

Evidence of ice loss from both poles this week has sparked fresh fears that global warming is progressing faster than scientists had predicted. Arctic ice has thinned dramatically, as well as shrinking in area, according to US research. Thin seasonal ice, which melts and refreezes each year, now makes up about 70 per cent of the Arctic winter ice, up from about 40 to 50 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving far less of the older, thicker ice that is harder to melt.

In the Antarctic, an ice bridge connecting an island to the Wilkins ice shelf – a sheet of ice about the size of Northern Ireland – shattered as scientists monitored it through satellite observations.

Crossposted from Antemedius

How much more will Americans take from Wall Street and the US Government before we start to see people rise up the way they are in Thailand?

ASEAN Summit Called Off As Thai Protesters Storm Site

by Charles McDermid, Los Angeles Times, via truthout.org
Saturday, 11 April 2009

   Pattaya, Thailand – Thousands of protesters smashed through a glass entrance and stormed a hotel complex today during a key meeting of regional heads of state.

   Thailand has declared a state of emergency in the summit’s host city Pattaya and the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been called off. Other protests have now been reported in the northern city of Chaing Mai, where protesters have blocked a road, and in Udon Thani, where demonstrators have surrounded City Hall.

   The widespread turmoil caps a week of anti-government protests that have paralyzed Bangkok and raised new fears about Thailand’s political stability.

   Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiv apologized to his regional counterparts and lifted the state of emergency in an impromptu press conference held in the abandoned venue seven hours after the protesters’ assault.

   “Anyone who declares this a victory is an enemy of the country,” said Abhisit.

   The demonstrators swarmed past police barricades and riot police in Pattaya for the second day to demand Abhisit step down and dissolve the government.

   Protest leader Kerk Somsan said the group overran the hotel in retaliation for one of their members allegedly being shot dead and others injured by gunfire in a clash with rival protesters earlier that day. They carried through on a vow to occupy the hotel if the government failed to make an arrest in the case within one hour. A Thai government spokesman said authorities are investigating the incident.

   The red-shirted protesters pushed police lines up the hotel’s steps and trapped them against the entrance. After several moments, the heaving glass shattered and protesters stormed the hotel. Many were waving flags, blowing whistles and horns and chanting “Thaksin,” the name of their exiled leader and benefactor, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

   The unarmed group raged through several adjacent buildings in the sprawling Pattaya Exhibition and Conference Center before gathering outside the meeting hall where nine leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, were inside having lunch. The leaders were later evacuated by helicopter from the resort’s rooftop, according to reports.

Crossposted from Antemedius

From RawStory, Saturday April 4, 2009:

A team of scientists claim to have unearthed startling data from dust and debris gathered in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Note: Abstract here… full .pdf here – 9.88mb

In a study published by the Open Chemical Physics Journal – a peer-reviewed, scientific publication – Steven E. Jones and Niels Harrit [Affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen] level a stark allegation: that within the dust and rubble of the World Trade Center towers lays evidence of “a highly engineered explosive,” contrary to all federal studies of the collapses.

“We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center,” reads the paper’s abstract. “One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).”

They claim their analysis has uncovered “active thermitic material”: a combination of elemental aluminum and iron oxide in form of thermite known as “nanostructured super-thermite.”

Sidestepping kind of reminds me of, of, of, ummmmm, lemme think here, uhhhhh…

Signing statements!

In eleven fuckin’ dimensions, no less!

ek reports today in his Weekend News Digest that the:

Administration Seeks an Out On Bailout Rules for Firms

^{Officials Worry Constraints Set by Congress Deter Participation}

By Amit R. Paley and David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, April 4, 2009; Page A01

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials. Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package. The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.

I take it that:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow [enormous multmillion dollar payouts to their criminal friends on Wall Street to] avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.

Administration officials have concluded that [enormous multmillion dollar payouts to their criminal friends on Wall Street are] vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.