1 Boring Old Man

Cheney: No link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11

CNN
June 1, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he does not believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning or execution of the September 11, 2001, attacks. He strongly defended the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, however, arguing that Hussein’s previous support for known terrorists was a serious danger after 9/11.

Cheney, in an appearance at the National Press Club, also said he is intent on speaking out in defense of the Bush administration’s national security record because "a clear understanding of policies that worked [in protecting the United States] is essential." "I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true," Cheney conceded.

But Hussein was "somebody who provided sanctuary and safe harbor and resources to terrorists… [It] is, without question, a fact."

Cheney restated his claim that "there was a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. It’s not something I made up. … We know for a fact that Saddam Hussein was a sponsor – a state sponsor – of terror. It’s not my judgment. That was the judgment of our [intelligence community] and State Department." Cheney identified former CIA Director George Tenet as the "prime source of information" on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Tenet "testified, if you go back and check the record, in the fall of [2002] before the Senate Intelligence Committee – in open session – that there was a relationship," Cheney said…

Notice, in spinning this whopper, he’s not saying, "George Tenet told me …" or "In meeting with the Director of the C.I.A., we were repeatedly informed that …" What he’s saying amounts to something like, "I’ve combed the records and I found where George Tenet testified to the SSCI that …" There are so many things to say about these comments, it’s hard to know where to start. Recall that the Campaign for the Invasion of Iraq began on September 8, 2002 with  an article by Judith Miller in the New York Times [U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts], Dick Cheney‘s appearance on Meet the Press, Condoleeza Rice‘s appearance on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, Colin Powell appearing on Fox News, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers thrown in for good measure.  At that point, George Tenet had only testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a Secret Session on September 5. In that session, he was confronted with the fact that there was no National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, and the Senators insisted on having one – which he reviews on September 24 and presents on October 1. I can’t locate the "open session" Cheney referred to yesterday, but here’s a letter they filed a week later [October 7, 2002]:

In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released Phase I of its report [Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq]. Phase II, the report on the Administration’s handling of the lead-up to the Invasion of Iraq was, however, not forthcoming. Senator Pat Roberts stalled until after the 2006 elections when the Chairmanship changed. Senator Jay Rockerfeller finally released that report in June 2008. So we don’t have to wait for some more talented researcher than I to chase down Cheney’s cherry-picked and distorted references, we have the report of the Senators who had six years to do it for us. Here’s their report summary:

Press Release of Intelligence Committee Senate Intelligence Committee Unveils Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence – Two Bipartisan Reports Detail Administration Misstatements on Prewar Iraq Intelligence, and Inappropriate Intelligence Activities by Pentagon Policy Office – June 5, 2008 “Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced.  Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said.  “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.  As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.” “It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.   Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.   “There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence.  But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.    “These reports represent the final chapter in our oversight of prewar intelligence.  They complete the story of mistakes and failures – both by the Intelligence Community and the Administration – in the lead up to the war.  Fundamentally, these reports are about transparency and holding our government accountable, and making sure these mistakes never happen again,” Rockefeller added.  The Committee’s report cites several conclusions in which the Administration’s public statements were NOT supported by the intelligence. They include: Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.  Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.  Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.  Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.  The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.  The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed

Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
Bob Dylan [Blowing in the Wind]

Levin: Memos don’t show what Cheney says they do
By Ed Hornick
CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, says former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims – that classified CIA memos show enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding worked – are wrong.

Levin, speaking at the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner in New York on Wednesday, said an investigation by his committee into detainee abuse charges over the use of the techniques – now deemed torture by the Obama administration – "gives the lie to Mr. Cheney’s claims."

The Michigan Democrat told the crowd that the two CIA documents that Cheney wants released "say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques."

"I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction," he added…

But the argument seems to go further. The people who argue that Abortion is Murder are  also generally opposed to Birth Control methods – condoms, birth control medication, diaphrams, morning after pills, etc. Apparently, their only solution to unwanted pregnancy or to over-population is Sexual Abstinence. They see Birth Control and Abortion as promoting Promiscuity. If sexual intercourse is separated from procreation, they seem to fear that we’ll all be running around having sex all the time. In that line of thinking, the prohibition against Birth Control is intended to be a preventive measure, designed to stop Sin. Ergo Sex is Sin [unless in the service of having children]. In the biblical account of creation, Sex is, in fact, the Original Sin. The Founders of our country, however, believed we should have separation between church and state. They also said:

Essentially, in this country, the only valid argument against legalized Abortion is that it is a Crime – the Crime of Murder. We’ll throw out the argument against other forms of Birth Control as the imposition of religious views by the state. That is particularly relevant to this last Administration that did put "abstinence only" clauses into government regulated programs. No reasonable argument. No thanks.

Suspect in George Tiller’s slaying reportedly belonged to anti-government militia

Scott Roeder, who is being held in the shooting death of Tiller, a Wichita abortion doctor, is said to be a member of militia groups. He also reportedly discussed violence against abortion providers.

Los Angeles Times
By Nicholas Riccardi

Reporting from Wichita, Kan. — The 51-year-old man authorities are holding today as a suspect in the assassination of prominent abortion doctor George Tiller has long discussed violence against abortion providers and belonged to right-wing "militia" groups, according to reports and acquaintances.

Authorities arrested Scott Roeder in a Kansas City suburb Sunday, hours after Dr. Tiller was gunned down in the foyer of a church in Wichita. Tiller had survived a previous shooting and the bombing of his clinic, and someone with the name of Scott Roeder had posted to antiabortion rights websites, urging people to target the physician’s church.

"I know that he believed in justifiable homicide," antiabortion activist Regina Dinwiddie told the Kansas City Star. "I know he very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones."

Roeder reportedly made a jailhouse visit to the activist who shot Tiller in 1993. Kansas City-area militia members said he was a member of their anti-government groups, and a man by his name was stopped by authorities in 1996 for driving with an improper license plate that read "Sovereign private property"…

As we learn more about Mr. Roeder, I hope the pro-life supporters will take the high road and actually examine how they are providing a vehicle for some of the sicker elements to flourish. In fact, the whole noisy Right in this country is allowing some of our most destructive societal elements to thrive and grow. The logic of all of these pro-life arguments has little to do with what matters here. It’s not the loftier thoughts of man that count, it’s the other side of the coin…

Reagan Did It
New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 31, 2009

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence. On the latter point: traditionally, the U.S. government ran significant budget deficits only in times of war or economic emergency. Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us.

The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking…

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down. These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped…

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate. But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital. There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

What infuriates me is that the people who got us here are fighting for the right to keep us here. It seems like they’d have the decency to recognize what happened and fade into the woodwork. Instead, they spew venom daily from every media outlet they can find. May the election of 2010 will finally give them the necessary respit to consider what they’ve done…

• Banks were allowed to merge.
• It removed the power of the Federal Reserve to set the interest rates of savings accounts.
• It allowed credit unions and savings and loans to offer checkable accounts.
• Allowed institutions to charge any interest rates they choose.

^{"This Reagan Administration initiative is designed to complete the process of giving expanded powers to federally chartered S&Ls and enables them to diversify their activities with the view of increasing profits. Major provisions include: elimination of deposit interest rate ceilings; elimination of the previous statutory limit on loan to value ratio; and expansion of the asset powers of federal S&Ls by permitting up to 40% of assets in commercial mortgages, up to 30% of assets in consumer loans, up to 10% of assets in commercial loans, and up to 10% of assets in commercial leases."}

^{The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act … is an Act of the United States Congress which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, opening up competition among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited a bank from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services.}

^{The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate. For example, Citibank merged with Travelers Group, an insurance company, and in 1998 formed the conglomerate Citigroup, a corporation combining banking and insurance underwriting services under brands including Smith-Barney, Shearson, Primerica and Travelers Insurance Corporation. This combination, announced in 1993 and finalized in 1994, would have violated the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act by combining insurance and securities companies, if not for a temporary waiver process. The law was passed to legalize these mergers on a permanent basis. Historically, the combined industry has been known as the financial services industry.}

^{The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 … is United States federal legislation which repealed the Shad-Johnson jurisdictional accord, which had banned single-stock futures in 1982. The legislation also provided certainty that products offered by banking institutions would not be regulated as futures contracts.}

^{This act was incorporated by reference into H.R. 4577, an omnibus spending bill. It was passed by the 106th United States Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton on December 21, 2000…}

^{The act has been cited as a public-policy decision significantly contributing to Enron’s bankruptcy in 2001 and the much broader liquidity crisis of September 2008 that led to the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers and emergency Federal Reserve Bank loans to American International Groupand to the creation of the U.S. Emergency Economic Stabilization fund.}

^{The "Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000" was introduced in the House on Dec. 14, 2000 … and never debated in the House. The companion bill was introduced in the Senate on Dec. 15th, 2000 (The last day before Christmas holiday) … and never debated in the Senate.}

^{Given the above-stated chronology, it would appear that the House and Senate versions of the bill were introduced just prior to the Christmas holiday in December of 2000, following George W Bush’s (first) election (in November of 2000), while then-President Clinton was serving out his final days as President. The bill was never debated by the House or Senate. The bill by-passed the substantive policy committees in both the House and the Senate so that there were neither hearings nor opportunities for recorded committee votes. In substance, it appears that the leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate and House incorporated the deregulation of credit default swaps into an omnibus budget bill at a time when the outgoing president was in no position to veto anything. The following article suggests that Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan endorsed this law The Bet That Blew Up Wall Street though Clinton’s position in 2000 is only suggested, not confirmed or made clear in the report…}

^{The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 has received criticism for the so-called "Enron loophole," which exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. The "loophole" was drafted by lobbyists for Enron working with senator Phil Gramm seeking a deregulated atmosphere for their new experiment, "Enron On-line."}

Comments
1

I know what’s coming… all the liberals and pro-choice people now have their "case" to back up their belief that all pro-life and/or conservative and/or Republican and/or Christian people have the same mindset of Roeder or that they are extremists or terrorists. They will stereotype them all based on this one man.

There have been MANY people in this world who were affiliated with some sort of organization and then committed some crime [even murder]. Just because they were a part of an organization does not mean that it is because of that organization that they chose to take a life or commit a crime.

But liberals are going to have a great time with this and use it as one more excuse to blast the "right." They seem to live for that.

It appears that the murderer will indeed turn out to be the kind of case this commenter describes. But I’m not having a "great time" nor am I interested in blasting the "right." People like this assassin or Eric Rudolph represent a small subset of people. But the commenter’s fallacy is greater than thinking we are people who hold the "belief that all pro-life and/or conservative and/or Republican and/or Christian people have the same mindset of Roeder or that they are extremists or terrorists." I don’t think that. But he, and many of his colleagues also think that we are all "pro-abortion." I’m not that either. Most of us aren’t.

I understand the pro-life sentiment. It is closer to my own personal feelings than the alternative. But I’m not a pregnant teen-aged girl desparately facing a life that I never planned. And I am a Physician that has seen too many children die from illicit abortions. And I am a Psychiatrist who knows that the fate of unwanted children is marred from the start in too many ways. And I am a citizen of the earth who knows that overpopulation lies at the root of many of our modern woes – climate change, hunger, disease, war.  And it is not lost on me that centuries of calls for abstinence have failed. So, until birth control is the norm, abortion will be with us, whether it is in a sanitary clinic setting or in a filthy backroom like it used to be.

And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that – when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do – that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground. That’s when we begin to say, "Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.

So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.

Understand – I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it – indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory – the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.

Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.

 

The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse
Washington Post Op-Ed
By Richard A. Clarke
May 31, 2009

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense… I have little sympathy for this argument… Cheney’s admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack…

The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration’s leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea…

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available…

Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures – such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times – would be the most effective.

Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA], the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.

Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques – but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

"I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration’s response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.

 

Richard Clarke greeted the new Administration with a memo [click on the image for the whole thing]  in their first week – laying out the clear and present danger of al Qaeda. He was ignored by George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice. He retired in January 2003 and wrote Against all Enemies, the first book I know of that began to expose the truth about our invasion of Iraq and our ignoring the al Qaeda threat prior to 9/11. He was heavily criticized by the Administration. Over the last six years, he has continued to tell anyone who would listen about his experience with the Bush Administration – a marginalized expert who could have changed the course of our history had he been listened to. He knew what he was talking about. In this Op-Ed, he says:

Kansas Abortion Doctor Slain at Church
By Scott Butterworth
Washington Post
May 31, 2009

George Tiller, perhaps the most prominent of the handful of doctors in the United States who perform late-term abortions, was shot and killed at his Wichita, Kan., church this morning, authorities said.

Police arrested a suspect in the slaying several hours later, about 160 miles away from Wichita on Interstate 35, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said at a news conference…

Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, where Sunday morning services were being held, Stolz said. The gunman then pointed a gun at two men who tried to stop him before driving away in a 1993 blue Ford Taurus, authorities said…

Washington Monthly
May 31, 2009

As Amanda Marcotte recently noted, "[Tiller] is one of the two doctors in the country that specializes in the very small percentage of abortions performed late in pregnancy [but before viability] done for health reasons, usually because the pregnancy is a danger to a woman’s health or life, or because the fetus is dead or dying…. He’s been shot in both arms, stalked by the attorney general’s office under Phill Kline … and charged with the crime of performing a bunch of illegal abortions, for which he was acquitted."

I emphasize this because it’s a point that may go overlooked in much of the media coverage — Tiller performed therapeutic abortions for women who wanted children. Tiller, in other words, worked past the constant threats of violence to provide a service to women that few would. Today, he was apparently murdered for his efforts.

Witchita Abortion Doctor Murdered
the left coaster
by Mary… May 31, 2009

… as this murder shows, in the United States, domestic terrorism is alive and well.

All told, according to statistics provided by the National Abortion Federation and not including this morning’s murder, since 1977, there have been seven murders, 17 attempted murders, 41 bombings, 175 arsons, 96 attempted bombings or arsons, 390 invasions, 1400 cases of vandalism, 1993 cases of trespassing, 100 butyric acid attacks, 659 anthrax threats, 179 cases of assault and battery, 406 death threats, four kidnappings, 151 burglaries, and 525 cases of stalking specifically directed at clinics, their workers, or their volunteers in the US and Canada. That’s over 6,100 cases of terrorist activity by the "pro-life" movement. And that’s just what was reported — the actual numbers are probably much higher.

The George Tiller I Knew
by loree920
DAILY KOS
Sun May 31, 2009

Like many in this community, my heart is heavy today.  There have been many great diaries that talk about Dr. Tiller’s years of service to women, and the threats he has endured throughout the last years of his life.  My story is a bit more personal and I want to share it with all of you to give you more insight into the man.

In 1975 my Mom noticed an indention in her left breast.  She called and made an appointment with her OB/GYN, Dr. George Tiller.  After his initial examination, he ordered a biopsy.  While performing the biopsy he immediately knew that the lump was cancerous. Instead of just closing and scheduling surgery, he "grabbed a handful", his words not mine. Her cancer Dr. credited this quick thinking by Dr. Tiller with saving her life, and due to this she didn’t even have to undergo chemotherapy.

Several years later my Mother and I were driving by his clinic in Wichita.  Mom started complaining of chest pains, so I drove into his parking lot and ran in to get help.  Dr. Tiller was by Mom’s side immediately, and stabilized her, before the heart attack could cause severe damage.

In 1980 I was pregnant with my first child.  I had no insurance and couldn’t afford a doctors appointment until I was approved for a medical card..  Mom told Dr. Tiller and he brought me into his office where he examined me, free of charge.  I can credit him with the very first picture taken of my son.

The last story I have to share is about my friends who could not have children.  Dr. Tiller’s office worked with several attorneys in the Wichita area to provide adoption services for his patients who wanted this option.  My friends have a 10 yr. old boy now, who is loved and adored.

I’m not a great writer, so I apologize that this isn’t nearly as eloquent as some of the diaries on Daily Kos.  I just wanted to get this story out to you, so you could hear how this man wasn’t just a tremendous fighter for women’s rights. he was a brilliant physician, and a kind and compassionate human being.  RIP Dr. Tiller and thank you for all you did for my friends and my family.

Says Scott Roeder [the man who was apparently the shooter] on the Operation Rescue site:

1. Scott Roeder Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
   Bleass everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tiller’s church [inside, not just outside] to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.

I never know what I feel when something like this happens. As a physician I had several situations where I helped someone get out of an abusive relationship, and worried about being the target of the ensuing rage. But I never recall being the focus of anyone who targetted me in an impersonal vendetta.  From what I read about Dr. Tiller, it was his willingness to help women whose health was genuinely threatened that placed him in harms way. That’s a particularly poignant tragedy.

Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?
The New York Times
by Frank Rich
05/31/2009

The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.

Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust [borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964] in the other.

The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.

The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11…

You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney’s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.

On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco…

What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.

The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.

As mentioned countless times, the aftermath of trauma is to be continuously involved in "preventing the past." Rich, and about a gajillion bloggers have post cheney stress disorder. We now know what happened, and we don’t want to see it happen again. Cheney, Limbaugh, and Gingrich are opposed by an Army this time — but they don’t seem to know it yet…

Horton confirms reports that unreleased torture photos show rape and sexual assault.

This week, the Daily Telegraph reported that the torture photos President Obama recently decided to withhold from the public depict “rape and sexual abuse.” The Pentagon denied the report, saying, “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article.” But yesterday, Scott Horton reported that he has confirmed that the photos do, in fact, “depict sexually explicit acts,” including “a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation,” as well as “penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.” Horton writes further:

A senior military officer familiar with the photos told me that they would likely provoke a storm of outrage if released. … Some show U.S. personnel engaged in sexual acts with prisoners and each other. In one, a female prisoner appears to have been forced to expose her breasts to be photographed. In another, a prisoner is suspended naked upside down from the top bunk of a bed in a stress position. […]
Still other withheld photographs have been circulating among U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq. One soldier showed them to me, including a photograph in which a male in a U.S. military uniform receives oral sex from a female prisoner.

Horton also obtained what he characterizes as “rarely seen Abu Ghraib torture photos,” which can be viewed here.

At times, when I’m ranting about this last eight years, I’m overcome with a feeling that combines grief, shame, and outrage. It’s like I have to remind myself daily that this stuff is real because I hate that feeling, and I would rather do any other thing and forget it all. Then something comes along like a PBS Special I watched last night about the very early WWII years in Germany and Russia. Stalin is exterminating 22,000 Polish Army officers in the Katyn Forest, while on the German side, the Death Camps were being constructed. And I see Hitler riding in a parade with Germans cheering madly, and it reminds me of what can happen when people don’t pay attention. They hate it when we make analogies between the Nazis, Stalin, and the Neoconservatives, but that doesn’t disuade me – false calls to war, invasions, torture, spying on civilians, secret documents. Just because they didn’t set up mass death camps doesn’t change the name of the game. It’s still tyranny. And it’s still racism. And the dead are just as dead. I make the same analogies with al Qaeda, and with the Taliban, and even Saddam Hussein, for what it’s worth.

Decrying war and barbarism is pretty easy in the abstract. But it’s harder when something like 9/11 happens, at least it was for me. I could understand why Osama Bin Laden was mad when he returned from the Afghanistan/Russia War to Saudi Arabia and found an American Base in his country. I could understand his protesting it. He lost me when he started his Terrorism attacks. 9/11 was inexcusable by any criteria and he deserves to be hunted down for it. I can still feel the fire in the belly about that attack. But our Invasion of Iraq makes me just as ill. We had no cause. We could’ve kept up the pressure on Iraq and achieved even better results with much less loss of face and life. That is unquestioned.

"That the Muslim world is waiting to see who is going to win the conflict. Is it going to be the West or is it going to be Al Qaeda? And by winning, we will send a powerful message that the momentum is on our side. And it will rally the Muslim world to us. It will also create a huge influence in the Middle East. Think about the creation of the democracy in the historic center of the Middle East with the third-largest oil reserves in the world. If we have a functioning democracy in Iraq, that’s an ally in the war on terror, a counterweight to mullahs Iran and to Assad in Syria, this will create a very hopeful center of reform and energy for reform throughout the Middle East."

Conservative Federalist Society Can Expect Its Status to Shrink
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post
November 21, 2008

Last year, there was a candlelight dinner at sold-out, shut-down Union Station to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society, with President Bush on stage and three Supreme Court justices in the audience. This year, it’s "welcome to the wilderness," as a former Clinton administration appointee good-naturedly told the group of lawyers yesterday at its annual meeting. William P. Marshall, a former deputy White House counsel for President Bill Clinton who teaches law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, promised to share survival tips after his party’s eight-year absence from power.

During that time, the conservative legal organization served as a catalyst for Bush’s efforts to change the federal judiciary. But the group now finds itself sorting through the role it should play in scrutinizing President-elect Barack Obama’s forthcoming efforts to bring about a similar change of his own…

Federalist Society executive vice president Leonard A. Leo laughed when asked about the wilderness remark, saying, "I know the media likes to talk about us in terms of power and influence." But he said the group’s primary goal has always been discussion of legal interpretation and limited constitutional government, and that that "remains as important as it was on November 3rd." The organization has always believed that the promotion of judges who share its conservative views is the most lasting way to enshrine its principles, and it has been extremely successful. The liberal Alliance for Justice estimates that 46 percent of Bush’s appointments have ties to the Federalist Society…

At one of the group’s events last month, Bush bragged that he has appointed more than a third of the federal judiciary that will be in place when he leaves office. While he has appointed slightly fewer appeals court judges than Clinton — 61 to 65 — Bush’s mostly young appointees will soon make up nearly two-thirds of the judges at that level, and Republican-appointed judges are in the majority on 10 of the 13 circuits…

I exhumed this article from 6 months ago because it has some guesses about numbers – numbers of judges appointed by George W. Bush under the watchful eye of the Federalist Society. The society was begun by a group including Edwin Meese, Robert Bork, Ted Olson and Steven Calabresi, and its members have included Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Jr. and Samuel Alito. All of these individuals are conservatives, and nearly all have served in Republican administrations. The Society looks to Federalist Paper Number 78 for an articulation of the virtue of judicial restraint, as written by Alexander Hamilton _[cite]:

"It can be of no weight to say that the courts, on the pretense of a repugnancy, may substitute their own pleasure to the constitutional intentions of the legislature…. The courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body."

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982, not long after the election of Ronald Reagan. It is the Federalist Society that John Yoo was referring to yesterday when he said, "But conservatives should not be pleased simply because Sotomayor is not a threat to the conservative revolution in constitutional law begun under the Reagan administration" as the conservative revolution in constitutional law.

What is this powerful organization about? Throughout the post-war years, the Supreme Court made a number of sweeping decisions in our interpretation of the Constitution – for example: Brown v. The Board of Education; Miranda v. Arizona; Roe v. Wade. For people like me, this was a golden age in which the Supreme Court finally made good on the promises of equality and civil rights that were already in our Constitution, but not in our American life. But for many, this was seen as "legislating from the bench." These people are "originalists" who believe in interpreting the Constitution as those who actually wrote it originally thought of it. An apt analogy would be the fundamentalists interpretation of the Bible or the Quran. If Mark says, "Take up serpents," they handle snakes. If the Quran says jihad, literal jihad with scimitar in hand it will be. So the Federalist Society has and will continue to roll back equal opportunity, civil rights, any modern elaboration of the promises of the Constitution.

The Vesting Clause of Article II provides that "[t]he executive Power [of the United States] shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Proponents of the unitary executive theory argue that this language, along with the Take Care Clause ("The President shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed…"), creates a "hierarchical, unified executive department under the direct control of the President."

The general principle that the President controls the entire executive branch was originally rather innocuous, but extreme forms of the theory have developed. John Dean explains: "In its most extreme form, unitary executive theory can mean that neither Congress nor the federal courts can tell the President what to do or how to do it, particularly regarding national security matters"…

Proponents of a strongly unitary theory argue that the President possesses all of the executive power and can therefore control subordinate officers and agencies of the executive branch. This implies that the power of Congress to remove executive agencies or officers from Presidential control is limited. Thus, under the strongly unitary executive theory, independent agencies and counsels are unconstitutional to the extent that they exercise discretionary executive power not controlled by the President…