Where Everybody Knows You're Numb

BoxDog · Guru

RE: "extraordinary measures"

Psych Lit · Guru

Nightowlhoot3 wrote:

Former winners include Frank Sinatra, BB King, Aretha Franklin, James Cagney and John Wayne, but also Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the founder of the Wendy's fast-food chain.

has the makings of a good jeopady question doenst it? lol. somehow giving dick cheney or rummy the medal of freedom just doesnt compute. geesh

(end of article)

-- Edited by Nightowlhoot3 at 09:46, 2009-03-06

Nightowlhoot3 · Guru

Anonymous wrote:

You know, when I think back to the pre-pre-emptive days I am drawn to some of the writings and pleas by Californias Rep. Henry Waxmans to congress. He was, for the most part brushed off by Dems as well as, obviously, the GOP and the Cheney machine. He sent letter upon letter with supporting documents asserting that we were being mislead (by Tony Blair) into a war against a country that did NOT have WMDs. He was relentless with his assertions that Blair was leading the paranoid propagandist efforts, and he was dead on right. The biggest problem of the day was that Blair had the ear of the war party, on the heals of a massive terrorist attack on American soil. We didn't care to hear Waxman. This country needed to draw blood. 9/11 was too fresh and as difficult as it was for some elected officials, the people of this country wanted, demanded that offensive. And that's what we got.

So, really, besides Bush? I'm amazed that Tony Blair lah-dee-dahhed out of office and about his business, in a forgettable fashion?

BD

Never fails to chill me to the core, no matter how much of the past administration's antics I see.

Coincidentally, did you know that when Nixon was in office, he hired a research firm to find out how feasible it would be to completely suspend the constitution, and basically just "take over" the country, and sort of make himself "king" or something? Scary part? Results showed it could happen -- that Americans would permit its happening, if they were fed the right line of BS.

Seems to me, it was Bush convincing Blair that the bombing of Iraq was a "good" and "right" thing to do, rather than the other way around.

IMO, Blair was affable enough, but really, too much of a Bush lap-dog to serve his (or any other) nation well. Even so, he's not leaving really in a (perhaps deserved, if only out of kindness) "forgettable fashion, but is instead being draped in acclaim:

'Tony's the kind of guy who looks you straight in the eye and tells the truth'

Oliver Burkeman in Washington
The Guardian, Wednesday 14 January 2009
Article history

George Bush presents Tony Blair with a presidential medal of freedom. Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP

For a brief moment in the ornate East Room of the White House yesterday lunchtime, it was just like the old days: the leaders of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, all chummy and shoulder-to-shoulder again. Except that two of them were leaders no longer, having hitched their fortunes to the third. And the third, with one week remaining in power, had decided it was time to repay them.

In a furtively short ceremony, overshadowed by Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearings, George Bush awarded Tony Blair and John Howard the presidential medal of freedom, America's highest civilian honour, praising them as "the sort of guys who look you in the eye, keep their word, and tell the truth".

Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, also received the award. Wives, Cherie among them, looked on approvingly.

The five-pointed white star puts the former prime minister in exalted, if eclectic, company. It is awarded in recognition of "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, or world peace, or cultural or other significant public or private endeavours".

Former winners include Frank Sinatra, BB King, Aretha Franklin, James Cagney and John Wayne, but also Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the founder of the Wendy's fast-food chain.

confuse

Blair, the US president said, would "stand tall in history".

Blair beamed and said nothing, which was probably wise. He had already been widely criticised for accepting the medal, which the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Ed Davey, characterised as a reward for "the biggest foreign policy disaster in recent history". As the special envoy for the international diplomatic quartet on the Middle East, his presence in Washington while fighting raged in Gaza risked compounding the bad taste left by the event.

But in the bubble of the East Room, nostalgia was the order of the day, as Bush recalled a friendship forged in the woods of Camp David and captured in a famous photograph - one man at ease in a flying jacket, the other in a tight-fitting jumper, his hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans. "As I said after the first meeting, I knew that when either of us gets in a bind, there will be a friend on the other end of the phone," said Bush, who presented the awards an hour into his final week in office.

After the 9/11 attacks, he said, Blair's backing "wasn't just on the phone line. When I stood in the House chamber to ask the civilised world to rally to freedom's cause, there in the gallery was a staunch friend, prime minister Tony Blair."

The award citation described Blair as "a powerful force for freedom and for building understanding between nations". The medal came with a more informal invitation as well: to drop in on Bush when he too has given up the exigencies of office. "We hope to have you come down and visit us in Texas," said Bush. "As you probably have heard, we're changing addresses here in a little less than seven days."

In 2003, the former prime minister was also awarded the congressional gold medal, the other highest civilian honour - but although he has addressed Congress, he has never collected the medal itself. There had been speculation that he feared a domestic political backlash if he did so, but recent reports suggest that the true explanation may be more mundane. Recipients of the congressional medal, unlike the presidential one, have a say in its design, and the US Commission on Fine Arts, which is involved in the process, is believed to have objected to Blair's chosen design. In a letter to the US Mint, the commission's secretary, Thomas Luebke, argued that the chosen image "is awkward and does not convey [Blair's] vitality".

(end of article)

-- Edited by Nightowlhoot3 at 09:46, 2009-03-06

Date: Fri Mar 6 8:55 AM, 2009

Psych Lit wrote:

SECURITY
Extraordinary Measures
A new memo shows just how far the Bush administration considered going in fighting the war on terror.
By Michael Isikoff | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Mar 2, 2009

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.
Many of the actions discussed in the Oct. 23, 2001, memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief lawyer, William Haynes, were never actually taken.
But the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counselalong with others made public for the first time Mondayillustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizenssteps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.
In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."
This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revokedbut not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration.
At that time, Steven Bradbury, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel throughout Bush's second term, concluded that Yoo's statements about overriding First Amendment freedoms were "unnecessary" and "overbroad and general and not sufficiently grounded in the particular circumstance of a concrete scenario," according to a memo from Bradbury also made public Monday.
Kate Martin, the director for the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington think tank, said the newly disclosed memo by Yoo and Robert Delahunty, another OLC lawyer, was part of a broader legal reasoning that gave President Bush essentially unfettered powers in the war on terrorism. "In October 2001, they were trying to construct a legal regime that would basically have allowed for the imposition of martial law," said Martin. (Yoo, also a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, did not respond to a request for comment. Gonzales's lawyer, George Terwilliger, said he had not yet had a chance to review the newly released memo and also declined to comment.)

You know, when I think back to the pre-pre-emptive days I am drawn to some of the writings and pleas by Californias Rep. Henry Waxmans to congress. He was, for the most part brushed off by Dems as well as, obviously, the GOP and the Cheney machine. He sent letter upon letter with supporting documents asserting that we were being mislead (by Tony Blair) into a war against a country that did NOT have WMDs. He was relentless with his assertions that Blair was leading the paranoid propagandist efforts, and he was dead on right. The biggest problem of the day was that Blair had the ear of the war party, on the heals of a massive terrorist attack on American soil. We didn't care to hear Waxman. This country needed to draw blood. 9/11 was too fresh and as difficult as it was for some elected officials, the people of this country wanted, demanded that offensive. And that's what we got.

So, really, besides Bush? I'm amazed that Tony Blair lah-dee-dahhed out of office and about his business, in a forgettable fashion?

BD

Psych Lit · Guru

SECURITY

Extraordinary Measures

A new memo shows just how far the Bush administration considered going in fighting the war on terror.

By Michael Isikoff | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Mar 2, 2009

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

Many of the actions discussed in the Oct. 23, 2001, memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief lawyer, William Haynes, were never actually taken.

But the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counselalong with others made public for the first time Mondayillustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizenssteps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.

In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revokedbut not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration.

At that time, Steven Bradbury, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel throughout Bush's second term, concluded that Yoo's statements about overriding First Amendment freedoms were "unnecessary" and "overbroad and general and not sufficiently grounded in the particular circumstance of a concrete scenario," according to a memo from Bradbury also made public Monday.

Kate Martin, the director for the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington think tank, said the newly disclosed memo by Yoo and Robert Delahunty, another OLC lawyer, was part of a broader legal reasoning that gave President Bush essentially unfettered powers in the war on terrorism. "In October 2001, they were trying to construct a legal regime that would basically have allowed for the imposition of martial law," said Martin. (Yoo, also a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, did not respond to a request for comment. Gonzales's lawyer, George Terwilliger, said he had not yet had a chance to review the newly released memo and also declined to comment.)