Check It Out for Tuesday, May 5th
Jason Leopold at Public Record writes that CIA torturers on the ground gave torture updates to CIA officials which were probably given to senior Bush regime officials dating back to 2002.
"CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley with daily "torture" updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-level” terrorist detainee who was held at a secret “black site” prison and waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to newly released court documents obtained by The Public Record.
"The extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials in Langley likely included updates provided to senior Bush administration officials.
"The government documents filed May 1, with U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein include two sets of indexes totaling 52 pages and contain general descriptions of cables sent back to CIA headquarters describing the August 2002 videotaped interrogation sessions of Zubaydah. Those cable transmissions included a description of the techniques interrogators had used and the intelligence, if any, culled from those sessions.
"Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, said, “it’s disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing to withhold the text of these cables despite the promise of transparency.”
"She added that withholding the information may not be about revealing secrets and instead is about protecting senior CIA officials.
“I think the frequency of the cables showed that CIA headquarters and senior officials had sanctioned interrogation methods that were illegal,” she said. “We see no basis for the continuing to withhold this information.”
"Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who first interrogated Zubaydah shortly after he was captured, complained to officials at FBI headquarters that early interrogations of Zubaydah by the CIA amounted to “borderline torture,” according to a report released last year by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine related to the FBI's role in harsh interrogations.
"Whether Zubaydah was tortured before the Aug. 1, 2002 memo was issued has been a matter of debate for some time.
"In the book, The Dark Side by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, she suggested there was a turf war between CIA and FBI related to interrogations of "war on terror" detainees. She wrote that when CIA Director George Tenet learned that it was the FBI agents whose “rapport-building” approach resulted in valuable intelligence from Zubaydah Tenet sent in a CIA team in April 2002, led by Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to the agency, to take over the interrogations, which became more aggressive.
"Mayer wrote that when Mitchell arrived he told Soufan and the other FBI agent that Zubaydah needed to be treated “like a dog in a cage.”
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) states that the swine flu scare highlights the deliberately insensible "no sick leave" realities facing large numbers of private industry workers
"President Obama last week advised Americans to take common sense precautions while the severity of the swine flu virus was still unknown, and just stay home from work if they weren’t feeling well.
"Problem is, millions of Americans can’t just stay home because they’re under the weather. When EPI looked at corporate sick leave policies in 2007 it found that some 43% of all private-industry workers have no paid sick days. Rather than the common sense precaution the President advices, these workers have a more difficult choice of going to work sick or staying home without pay and risk losing their jobs. In this current climate of high unemployment and even higher job insecurity, workers without any formal sick leave are even less likely to risk taking a day off.
Sibel Edmonds writes at Counterpunch about a broken Congress.
John Kerry: “It’s a sad day when you have members of congress who are literally criminals go undisciplined by their colleagues. No wonder people look at Washington and know this city is broken.”
"The people do indeed look at Washington and know that this city is ‘badly’ broken, Senator Kerry. The public confidence in our Congress has been declining drastically. Recent poll results highlight how the American people’s trust in their congress has hit rock bottom. A survey of progressive blogs easily confirms the rage rightfully directed at our congress for abdicating its role of oversight and accountability. Activists scream about promised hearings that never took place - without explanation. They express outrage when investigations are dropped without any justification. And they genuinely wonder out loud why, especially after they helped secure a major victory for the Democrats. The same Democrats who had for years pointed fingers at their big bad Republican majority colleagues as the main impediment preventing them from fulfilling what was expected of them.
"How does it work? How do these people escape accountability, the consequences? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against congressional representatives, as if Hoover’s days were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties. Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of congress keep tabs on each other? Or, is it a combination of the above? Regardless, we see this ‘one for all, all for one’ kind of solidarity in congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman."Those who have been entrusted with the oversight and accountability of our government cannot do so if they are vulnerable to such blackmails from the very same people they are overseeing…Period. Those who have been elected to represent the people and their interests cannot pursue their own greed and ambitions by engaging in criminal or unethical activities against the interests of the same people they’ve sworn to represent, and be given a pass.
"More people realize that real change will require not replacing one or two or three, but many more. More people are coming to understand that the road to achieving government of the people passes through a congress, but not the one currently occupied by the many crusty charlatans who represent only self-interest - achieved by representing the interests of those other than the majority of the people of this nation. And so I write.
"Here I go again, rather than ending this in a long paragraph or two, I will let another long-gone man do it shortly and effectively 'If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives.”--- Will Rogers.' "
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