Tag: Jason Leopold

Apr 08 2010

Obama Tells CIA to Kill US Citizen

The Obama administration has lowered another legal barrier shielding  Americans from extrajudicial punitive action by their own  government, in this case authorizing the CIA to kill a US citizen suspected of  having ties to al-Qaeda in Yemen and links to two attacks inside the United  States last year.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric born in New Mexico but now living in Yemen, may  be the first US citizen targeted for  assassination by the CIA under a counter-terror policy established by  President George W. Bush and since embraced by President Barack Obama.

Awlaki was previously  viewed simply as an Islamic preacher  espousing a radical religious viewpoint, but the reassessment of his status  began last year when it was disclosed that Army Maj. Nidal Hassan had been communicating with  Awlaki via e-mail before the Army psychiatrist allegedly shot and  killed 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood in Texas last November.

A month later, on Christmas Day, a  young Nigerian man, Umar  Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up a  Northwest Airlines jetliner over  Detroit, and US intelligence  officials revealed that Abdulmutallab  had been a student of Awlaki’s in Yemen. Though Awlaki denied ordering the attack, word began to spread that the CIA was adding Awlaki to a list of about  two dozen  people targeted for assassination.

Multiple press reports now indicate  that Awlaki has been put  on the death list, a move that the Obama  administration justifies by claiming  to have information that Awlaki  has shifted from denouncing the United  States to plotting violent acts against Americans.

Read all of it here:

Obama Administration Authorizes CIA to Kill US Citizen

by Jason Leopold, April 7, 2010

Apr 01 2010

Not al Qaeda, Collapse of the bush Administration!!!

Looks like much more of the cheney/bush years are continuing to collapse, and All Done In Our Names. This may explain the widespread push, especially from republicans? in Congress, they’re figureheads around the Country and those connected to that administration but not in Government have so forcefully been pushing the fox nation types to rail against closing Gitmo and having No Trials of so called terrorist inside this Country and in our Courts. Courts of a supposedly Lawful Nation!

Truthout has updated an earlier report of what’s coming down.

Jul 08 2009

Industry Execs Suggested Invasion, Eager to Tap Iraq’s Vast Oil Reserves

Conspiracies aren’t theories.   They happen all the time.  All it takes for a conspiracy to occur is for a few people to get together and decide to do something.

Which is what the Bush administration was all about.

It is now no secret that Enron, for example, along with some other energy companies, conspired to cause the California “energy crisis” in 2001.   Bush and Cheney should have been impeached for that alone, and would have been, had not 9/11 come along to “change everything”.     You can read about that here if you’d like.

It’s also quite well known that Cheney never did, and never would, release the minutes of his big energy “task force” right after they took power in 2001.   They would have had to pry his cold dead fingers off that thing to find out who was there, and what was discussed.

Well it turns out that as many of us have long suspected, what oil industry executives advocated was an invasion of Iraq, to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s control of Iraq’s oil.

 

Jun 24 2009

UPDATED w/video: Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Plame’s Lawsuit Against Cheney, Rove

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Plame’s Lawsuit Against Cheney, Rove

by Jason Leopold, June 23, 2009

The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a civil lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, against Bush administration officials who were responsible for leaking her covert CIA status to the media and attacking her husband for accusing the White House of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence.

The Supreme Court’s rejection effectively brings the three-year-old case to a close. The Wilson’s had sued Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Cheney’s ex-chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for violating their civil rights. Libby was convicted on four of five counts and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. President George W. Bush later commuted the sentence, sparing Libby jail time.

“The Wilsons and their counsel are disappointed by the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, but more significantly, this is a setback for our democracy,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics [CREW] in Washington, an attorney representing the Wilsons. “This decision means that government officials can abuse their power for political purposes without fear of repercussion. Private citizens like the Wilsons, who see their careers destroyed and their lives placed in jeopardy by administration officials seeking to score political points and silence opposition, have no recourse.”

Jun 05 2009

Crisis at the VA as Benefits Claims Backlog Nearly Tops One Million

Crisis at the VA as Benefits Claims Backlog Nearly Tops One Million

by Jason Leopold, June 5, 2009

   During the past four months, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) backlog of unfinished disability claims grew by more than 100,000, adding to an already mountainous backlog that is now close to topping one million.

   The VA’s claims backlog, which includes all benefits claims and all appeals at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) and the Board of Veterans Appeals at VA, was 803,000 on January 5, 2009. The backlog hit 915,000 on May 4, 2009, a staggering 14 percent increase in four months.

   The issue has become so dire that veterans now wait an average of six months to receive disability benefits and as long as four years for their appeals to be heard in cases where their benefits were denied.

   Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said during a hearing in March that the VA is “almost criminally behind in processing claims.”

   Overhauling the VA represents one of the most daunting challenges facing the Obama administration after years of mismanagement and neglect by the Bush administration, which stacked the agency with political cronies and kept the agency underfunded, wrapped in bureaucratic red tape and placed the interests of veterans last on a list of priorities.

   Indeed, one of the VA’s biggest failures during the Bush administration’s tenure was its inability to fully implement critical components of the Mental Health Strategic Plan (MHSP) at regional offices throughout the country.

   The MHSP, unveiled in 2004, would have provided veterans who show signs of being at risk of suicide or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with immediate mental health care and eliminated the waiting period for receiving treatment.

   But according to a November 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), spending for the program was substantially less than what the VA had proposed – leaving untreated tens of thousands of veterans who were at risk of suicide.

May 15 2009

Jason Leopold Exclusive: “Army Documents Describe Prisoner Abuse Photos Obama is Withholding”

Barack Obama backflipped on his promise to make public photos depicting detainee abuse by U.S. personnel overseas, however one intrepid independent reporter has managed, digging through government files obtained through an ACLU FOIA request, to unearth detailed documents describing the photographs.

U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan took dozens of pictures of their colleagues pointing assault rifles and pistols at the heads and backs of hooded and bound detainees and another photograph showed two male soldiers and one female solider pointing a broom to one detainee “as if I was sticking the end of a broom stick into [his] rectum,” according to the female soldier’s account as told to an Army criminal investigator.

President Barack Obama said Wednesday he would not release these photographs, reversing a promise he made a month ago, fearing it would stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.

I found the documents that describes the photographs on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU obtained the files, but not the photographs, in 2005 as part of the organization’s wide-ranging Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the federal government related to the Bush administration’s treatment of “war on terror” prisoners in U.S. custody.

Read the entire article at The Public Record…

May 01 2009

Released FBI Memo Documents Bush Ordering Torture (updated)

For the Soldier who fights for Truth, calls his enemy his brother. — William Blake

Jason Leopold had an amazing find when perusing a new released FBI document the ACLU posted on their site earlier this week. [Update: Leopold informs me that the document was released in Dec. 2004, but he caught the info while perusing the ACLU collection over these past months.]

Senior FBI agents stationed in Iraq in 2004 claimed in an e-mail that President George W. Bush signed an executive order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other harsh tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.

The FBI e-mail — dated May 22, 2004 — followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential executive order.

Mar 28 2009

SASC Full Declassified Report Due Out, Levin to Call for DOJ Referral

Jason Leopold reported today that the Senate Armed Services Committee is very close to releasing — “possibly as early as next week” — its 200 page, 2000 footnote

… voluminous report on the treatment of detainees held in U.S. custody and the interrogations methods they were subjected to, according to Defense Department and intelligence sources, who described the report as the most detailed account to date of how the Bush administration and Defense Department implemented interrogation methods widely regarded as torture.

Levin and the SASC’s investigation is a gold mine of information about how the Bush administration implemented its torture program. Both the documents produced by the investigation, and the declassified 19-page summary released by Sen. Levin last year contained important new information, such the details surrounding John Yoo’s drafting of the torture memos.

Feb 13 2009

Scott Horton: Yes, They Hid Torture Evidence from Obama

Scott Horton has followed up on the UK Guardian story, which I also wrote on last night, describing how Reprieve attorney Clive Stafford Smith, whose organization is helping defend Guantanamo detainee and British resident Binyam Mohamed, had information he was sending to President Obama on Mohamed’s torture censored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

At Daily Kos, a number of readers were incredulous at the claims I, and by implication, Stafford Smith was making about Obama being kept out of the information loop, suggesting that I was prone to conspiracy theories, or a dupe for grandstanding by Mohamed’s attorneys. Some suggested either the Guardian or myself or both had completely misunderstood the situation.

But Horton, who has been following this story carefully, and is known to have excellent sources, reported on the Guardian article much as I had, and added this: