Precise Points of Fact

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons. It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy. The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take– RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded. BUSH: Yeah, that’s right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they’re going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

Some time after Sharren McGarry went to work as a mortgage consultant at Wachovia’s Stuart, Fla., branch in July 2007, she and her colleagues were directed to market a mortgage called the “Pick A Pay” loan. Sales commissions on the product were double the rates for conventional mortgages, and she was required to make sure nearly half the loans she sold were “Pick A Pay,” she said. These “pay option” adjustable-rate mortgages gave borrowers a choice of payments each month. They also carried a feature that came as a nasty surprise to some borrowers, called “negative amortization.” If the homeowner opted to pay less than the full monthly amount, the difference was tacked onto the principal. When the loan automatically “recasted” in five or 10 years, the owner would be locked into a new, much higher, set monthly payment.

It turns out that the nine banks about to be getting a total equity capital injection of $125 billion, courtesy of Phase I of The Bailout Plan, had reserved $108 billion during the first nine months of 2008 in order to pay for compensation and bonuses (PDF).

Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection has some environmental advice for the incoming Obama administration: focus on energy efficiency and renewable resources, and create a unified U.S. power grid. On Thursday, the group Gore founded rolled out a new media campaign to push for immediate investments in three energy areas it maintains would help meet Gore’s previously announced challenge to produce 100 percent clean electricity in the United States in a decade.

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

“Anyone who’s wondering if there’s a recession should stop wondering,” said Nigel Gault, U.S. economist for Global Insight, which will release its updated forecast on Monday. “The recent data were deteriorating sharply” even before factoring in the latest impact of the credit squeeze.

But there’s another way: Create an agency to fund the bailout, loan that agency the money from the treasury, and then have that agency tax Wall Street to pay us (the treasury) back. It’s been done before, and has several benefits. In the United Kingdom, for example, whenever you buy or sell a share of stock (or a credit swap or a derivative, or any other activity of that sort) you pay a small tax on the transaction. We did the same thing here in the US from 1914 to 1966 (and, before that, we did it to finance the Spanish American War and the Civil War). For us, this Securities Turnover Excise Tax (STET) was a revenue source. For example, if we were to instate a .25 percent STET (tax) on every stock, swap, derivitive, or other trade today, it would produce - in its first year - around $150 billion in revenue. Wall Street would be generating the money to fund its own bailout. (For comparison, as best I can determine, the UK’s STET is .25 percent, and Taiwan just dropped theirs from .60 to .30 percent.)

Leading Journalists Expose Major Media Manipulations The riveting excerpts below are from the revealing accounts of 20 award-winning journalists in the highly acclaimed book Into the Buzzsaw. These courageous writers were prevented by corporate media ownership from reporting major news stories. Some were even fired or laid off. They have won numerous awards, including several Emmys and a Pulitzer. Join in building a better world by helping to spread this news across the land. Jane Akre—Fox News.

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009 * #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation * # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA * # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business * # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America? * # 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets * # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act * # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking * # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly * #9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify * # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture * # 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror * # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind * # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq * # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste * # 15 Worldwide Slavery * # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights * # 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights * # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers * # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction * # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record * # 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option * # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid * # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs * # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror * # 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

An attorney representing Alaska’s Legislative Council said John McCain’s presidential campaign fears a statewide ethics investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s vice presidential running mate, “would cause serious damage to the Republican ticket” if details of the probe were “publicly known before the national election.” Anchorage attorney Peter Maassen made those comments in a 17-page court filing Wednesday where he asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed last week by five Republican lawmakers who are trying to stop the Palin investigation. Maassen accused the McCain campaign of trying to derail a two-month old investigation to determine whether Gov. Sarah Palin improperly fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.