Deception by Treason

An absolutely breathtaking piece of news has just surfaced which shows that the Justice Department and in particular, Alberto Gonzalez was actually drawing up a memorandum in 2005, in which the guidelines for interrogating people included subjecting prisoners to painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures at the same time as Congress was moving to disallow “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment.

The Times article claims that the memorandum was kept secret from almost all lawmakers and that it stated that none of C.I.A. interrogation methods violated the standard set by the Congressional motion. However if one remembers correctly, the Deputy Attorney general James B. Comey resigned after repeatedly coming to verbal blows with the White House about, amongst other things, the inexcusable interpretation of the law by the Bush Administration regarding the treatment of prisoners. From the article:

Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

To refresh our memories: John Yoo originally penned the first “Torture Memo,” as it became known which basically said it didn’t matter what one did to a prisoner as long as the man was alive at the end of it. Yoo, who was called ‘Dr. Yes’ by none other than John Ashcroft for his willingness to do whatever the Bush Administration requested of him, eventually left the Justice Department after the memo was leaked. The Justice Department under John Ashcroft eventually started bucking and would not simply accept any form of mistreatment of terror suspects without clearly defining the rules. For example, if keeping a prisoner at a very cold temperature was one accepted method and depriving the man also of rest was another, was it permissible also to combine the two?

The United States Supreme Court ruled unequivocally that the Geneva Conventions applied to members of terrorist organizations just as they did to a normal soldier. This led to the Bush Administration admitting to having shipped suspected criminals overseas in what was referred to as “Special rendition” and the CIA stopped its program of waterboarding prisoners. Later however, a new Executive order was signed allowing for so-called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” In normal speak we are talking again about torture.

To counteract the resistance within the Justice Department, Bush needed to have someone in there he could trust. Someone who would toe the line; enter, Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales effectively transformed the Justice Department into a Neocon circus and turned it into a laughing stock. Gonzales and his minions were soon able to press an embattled Comey out of the Justice Department and with Comey gone, they had free reign. Thus they managed by a series of backhanded comments, to present Congress with the impression that there was movement to ban torture whilst simultaneously ensuring the ability of interrogators to continue to use the very techniques that they were pretending to outlaw.

It’s an unfathomable display of disrespect of Congress and the American people and is the absolute epitome of treasonous conduct.

Justice Department Shenanigans Part XXXVII

What happens, when a country’s Justice Department is so embroiled in the politics of the party in power? Well, the obvious answer is that corruption of the Justice Department and perversion of the course of justice, are both things that could occur if there was such a marriage, which is why constitutionally, there had to be a separation. As we’ve seen however, this traditional separation, which was carried out to the extreme by the Clinton Administration, which reduced the interface between the White House and the Justice Department to a minimalist four persons – an absolute record to date - has been breached. This Administration has done everything to marry in to the Justice department and the lines of division have become murky and hard to discern.

In the Soviet Union of the 1980s, a company would be basically owned by the government and in that context, many of the perpetrators of crimes ranging from speeding tickets for the CEOs of those companies through to the responsibility of chemical companies for poisoning large tracts of land, water and air were swept under the rug when the Soviet equivalent of the Justice department was basically held back by the politburo in power at the time. That’s one of the reasons the Soviet Union sucked at the time, right?

So what would you say if a US attorney prosecuting a case against an American Drug manufacturer responsible for the wrongful deaths of 146 people was threatened with dismissal if he did not drop the case? One might be tempted into thinking that that was hardly possible. But in this America, it is. The night before a US attorney obtained a guilty plea from the manufacturer of OxyContin, he was called by a senior Justice Department official at the behest of a Purdue Pharma executive. The Justice Department hack told the prosecuting attorney to slow the case down. Here’s how Amy Goldstein and Carrie Johnson of The Washington Post reported the story:

John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, testified that he was at home the evening of Oct. 24 when he received the call on his cellphone from Michael J. Elston, then chief of staff to the deputy attorney general and one of the Justice aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Brownlee settled the case anyway. Eight days later, his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.

The Justice Department, of course, denies any wrong doing. However, it turns out that Elston called Browmlee at Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty’s request. McNulty was the sixth senior aide to Gonzales to resign over the firings of US attorneys.

Enough said.

The Next Step

The massive shift to the right that continues to be felt in this country since the Bush Administration came into power has been well documented and indeed, we are witnessing signs of the despotic nature of the present government every day. The most obvious one is the Executive branch’s unwillingness to answer to the Legislative branch’s demands. Other signs are the stringent so-called security reforms which have come about under the umbrella of Homeland Security. This Orwellian Department was created as a means of allegedly fusing the various security and support sections of government beneath it. Furthermore, the FBI and CIA have seen a massive boost in their ability to illegally listen in on telephone conversations and read private mail, whether it be email or regular mail, to an unprecedented extent. Things that were considered to belong only to totalitarian regimes such as the incarceration and torture of prisoners held indefinitely without charges being brought against them, have become an everyday occurrence. The hijacking of the Justice Department by a rabid White House was apparently the icing on the cake.

But it didn’t stop there. I experienced first hand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing discovery of literally hundreds of thousands of files compounded on ordinary citizens; information which was passed on to the Stasi, the ‘State security Police,’ by thousands upon thousands of informants. People were compromised by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MFS) and were forced, coerced or threatened into spying on their friends, neighbors, husbands, wives, sisters or anyone in their circle of acquaintances. The most mundane aspects of the lives of ordinary citizens were documented in a maddeningly bureaucratic manner down to the tooth-brushing habits of individuals or their breakfast preferences. It was an unfathomable infringement of the rights of the citizens of that country made possible by the gigantic network of clandestine informants that the MFS had recruited over time. This is now coming to America, as Justin Rood of ABC reports:

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.

Do not for one minute think that the above scenario, which became part of everyday life in the former German Democratic Republic under its allegedly socialist regime, could not happen in the United States. Consider that it happened there with over 95% of the population opposed to these practices, whereas the fear of terrorism which has gripped this country, driven by an administration which is using fear to bludgeon the mostly undereducated population into accepting its arguments for a need for increased surveillance, has conditioned people into believing that draconian security measures and clandestine wiretapping are a necessary part of life.

They are not. It is as unnecessary to live in fear of a terrorist attack as it is to worry every day that one might die of kidney failure. The instrument of fear is being wielded to control an already cowed population into accepting anything and everything and the non-occurrence of an event, of a terrorist attack, is being proclaimed by such media outlets as FOX News as being the success story brought about by an infringement of our rights as citizens. The America which represented freedom is slipping into a dark world of repressive government legislation disseminated by a cabal of power-hungry, despotic politicians and supported by a Justice Department which has lost all autonomy.

Articles of Impeachment should be drawn up for Bush and Cheney and Alberto Gonzales should be held accountable for perjury and thrown out of his job. Make no mistake; it is better to impeach than to sit back and allow the current trend to continue. The concern of many, that impeachment will not work because the vote will never pass the House, is erroneous. It is the constitutional duty of Congress to impeach and it is the duty of the American people to hold Congress accountable for upholding the Constitution. At worst it will stall this government and prevent it from dragging this country further into the abyss.