BK
To add to the fodder... now the're going to confirm an attorney general that thinks water boarding is not torture. We must get our house in order and win back some our lost allies in the world.
As far as a dictatorship goes.. we have one with BUSH and Darth Vader at the helm... just trust me WITH NO OVERSITE...........
GREAT OP-ED PIECE IN THE STAR BANNER
Teepen: Add Blackwater to Bush misadventures hidden by a veil of secrecy
By TOM TEEPEN
Cox News Service
Friday, November 02, 2007
Was any administration before George W. Bush's ever as panoramic in its contempt for the public's curiosity about how its business is being conducted?
Whether from malice or misadventure – and both have been present in large dollops – this president and his crowd have relentlessly buried government deeply in secrecy and dark corners.
It appears that misadventure is the culprit in the latest de facto cover up; misadventure is always plausible in a presidency whose incompetence has become a legend in its own time.
There was outrage in September when Blackwater mercenaries who have been hired to protect U.S. diplomatic personnel in Iraq gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in what the company has said was self-defense but what many witnesses condemned as wanton killing.
(Blackwater is one of the scads of private contractors to which this administration has parceled out government duties so that favored freebooters can charge taxpayers for profits on services that taxpayers used to get at cost.)
In a sweet set-up, the mercenaries already were exempt from both U.S. military and civil justice, but in a welcome surprise, State Department investigators said they would jump right on the case anyway. Truth would out.
But, oops, it turns out the investigators gave all the suspects limited immunity in their interrogations. That means the testimony probably can't be used and thus tested in any trial, even if an apt venue for one could be found. So what looks like still one more administration :edit:-up, this one deadly and perhaps murderous, disappears into the administration's bulging black bag. Once again, we'll never know.
No surprise, of course. The White House has repeatedly refused to let Cabinet officers testify to congressional hearings looking into suspect administration activities, citing executive privilege, national security or whatever excuse might work.
And when officials have been allowed to testify, their performances often have shown more bobbing and weaving than a 12-round fight. Some, taking a cue from Vice President Dick Cheney, simply stonewall.
Recent Attorney General Alberto Gonzales did testify, and often, but blithely contradicted himself and when even that seemed like too much bother pleaded a memory with more holes than a poor man's socks.
The White House has rewritten federal rules so that more documents than before can be, and are, classified secret. It has sequestered the papers of previous presidencies that had been scheduled to be made public.
The administration is, let's say, leisurely about responding to Freedom of Information requests and when it finally does respond the result is often the release of documents with so many, and such extensive, redactions that looking at them is like studying midnight.
And thousands of executive branch e-mails have gone missing. (Here we are back to the malice-or-mischief conundrum.)
Whatever else may also be at play, all of this secretiveness serves Bush's constant effort to imbue the presidency and its executive branch with a presumptive right to rule unilaterally, and the legislature and judiciary go hang.
To stake that grandiose claim, botching the investigation of 17 deaths or — might it be? — countenancing 17 murders may seem not such a big deal.