Mukasey All But Cooked Now, Bush backs Him

[LoungeMachine]

Bush Backs Attorney General Nominee

By Dan Eggen, Paul Kane and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 1, 2007; 11:43 AM

President Bush today defended the refusal of his attorney general nominee to comment on the legality of a harsh CIA interrogation technique, saying former judge Michael B. Mukasey was being asked "unfair" questions at his Senate confirmation hearing.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Bush himself refused to say whether the technique -- a method known as waterboarding that simulates drowning -- is being used or whether he considers it legal.

Bush said he was "extremely disappointed" in Congress over the confirmation process and other issues, and he called on the Senate to approve Mukasey promptly. He said the Justice Department needs a new leader to help wage the war on terrorism.

The unusual Oval Office session with pool reporters came as Democratic support for Mukasey dwindles over the waterboarding issue. Tuesday's vote on Mukasey's nomination by the Senate Judiciary Committee is shaping up to be much closer than originally expected.

Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) announced yesterday that they will join Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) in voting against Mukasey on the Judiciary panel, after the nominee said in a four-page letter to Senate Democrats that he does not know whether waterboarding constitutes illegal torture under U.S. law.

Other Democrats on the Judiciary panel have pointedly refused to disclose how they will vote during a special meeting to consider Mukasey's nomination, which has been scheduled for Tuesday. Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) also declined to say whether he will allow the nomination go to the full Senate with a negative recommendation, which occurred with some past nominations.

White House officials said yesterday that they remain confident Mukasey will be confirmed, and Republicans again accused the Democrats of attempting to hold the nomination hostage to score political points. "No one is ready to declare it DOA," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.


Bush told reporters this morning that it was unfair to ask Mukasey about waterboarding because "he doesn't know whether we use that technique or not." He declined to clarify the matter, saying that "it doesn't make any sense to tell the enemy whether we use those techniques or not."

In any case, he said, "the American people must know that whatever techniques we use are within the law." He said the CIA's detainee interrogation program "is important, and the techniques used are within the law, and members of the intelligence committee know what I'm talking about."

Bush said Mukasey "is not being treated fairly." But when asked about his own view of the legality of waterboarding, he said, "I'm not going to talk about techniques. There's an enemy out there." Nor would he say whether there is concern about legal liability in U.S. or foreign courts.

Mukasey's nomination has become a particularly thorny problem for his original Senate patron, Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). He had suggested Mukasey as a consensus nominee to the White House and declared two weeks ago that he should be confirmed, but he was noncommittal yesterday.

"I'm reading the letter; I'm going over it," Schumer told reporters. "That's all I'm going to say."



CONTINUED http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/01/AR2007110101117.html?hpid=topnews

[LoungeMachine]

I seriously thought Schumer had found the guy to fill the temp job.

This was supposed to be a shoe-in.

HOW CAN YOU NOT SAY WATERBOARDING IS TORTURE????

Oh, yeah, because Speedy Gonzalez is the one who approved it.

Doh!

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine


President Bush today defended the refusal of his attorney general nominee to comment on the legality of a harsh CIA interrogation technique, saying former judge Michael B. Mukasey was being asked "unfair" questions at his Senate confirmation hearing.



Unfair question ?????

wtf?

:rolleyes:

Jesus Christ Chimpy is a fucking tool.

Heaven forbid the Senate should ask him about TORTURE

[LoungeMachine]

From The Sunday Times

October 7, 2007

Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led

Andrew Sullivan

I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception. I didn’t believe America would ever do those things. I’d also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend.

It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the far left or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives to lie about this stuff, don’t they? Bottom line: I trusted the president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and are defending. And then I was forced to confront the evidence.

From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It would torture detainees to get information.

This decision was and is illegal, and violates America’s treaty obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations convention against torture, and US law. Although America has allied itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done more than any other nation to banish torture from the world. George Washington himself vowed that it would be a defining mark of the new nation that such tactics, used by the British in his day, would be anathema to Americans.

But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. The decision to enter what Dick Cheney called “the dark side” was made, moreover, in secret; interrogators who had no idea how to do these things were asked to replicate some of the methods US soldiers had been trained to resist if captured by the Soviets or Vietcong.

Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia, beatings, excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep deprivation, and threats to family members (even the children of terror suspects), were approved by Bush and inflicted on an unknown number of terror suspects by American officials, CIA agents and, in the chaos of Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu Ghraib. And when the horror came to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted a few grunts at the lowest level. The official reports were barred from investigating fully up the chain of command.

Legally, the White House knew from the start that it was on extremely shaky ground. And so officials told pliant in-house lawyers to concoct memos to make what was illegal legal. Their irritation with the rule of law, and their belief that the president had the constitutional authority to waive it, became a hallmark of their work.

They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent to the loss of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything else was what was first called “coercive interrogation”, subsequently amended to “enhanced interrogation”. These terms were deployed in order for the president to be able to say that he didn’t support “torture”. We were through the looking glass.

After Abu Ghraib, some progress was made in restraining these torture policies. The memo defining torture out of existence was rescinded. The Military Commissions Act was crafted to prevent the military itself from being forced to violate its own code of justice. But the administration clung to its torture policies, and tried every legal manoeuvre to keep it going and keep it secret. Much of this stemmed from the vice-president’s office.

Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long after Abu Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal legal memos that asserted the legality of many of the techniques exposed there. The memos not only gave legal cover to waterboarding, hypothermia and beating but allowed them in combination to intensify the effect.

The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring water over him while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce repeated episodes of dangerous hypothermia, was not “cruel, inhuman or degrading”. We have a log of such a technique being used at Guantanamo. The victim had to be rushed to hospital, brought back from death, then submitted once again to “enhanced interrogation”.

George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful”.

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.

The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).

The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheney’s arguments. Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to all detainees, including those out of uniform. They didn’t qualify for full PoW status, but they couldn’t be abused either. The court also relied on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and international law: “The court found it decisive that the defendants had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims, and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment . . .”

The definition of torture remains the infliction of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” with the intent of procuring intelligence. In 1948, in other words, America rejected the semantics of the current president and his aides. The penalty for those who were found guilty was death. This is how far we’ve come. And this fateful, profound decision to change what America stands for was made in secret. The president kept it from Congress and from many parts of his own administration.

Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out what to do about this, if anything. So far Congress has been extremely passive, although last week’s leaks about the secret pro-torture memos after Abu Ghraib forced Arlen Specter, a Republican senator, to proclaim that the memos “are more than surprising. I think they are shocking”. Yet the public, by and large, remains indifferent; and all the Republican candidates, bar John McCain and Ron Paul, endorse continuing the use of torture.

One day America will come back– the America that defends human rights, the America that would never torture detainees, the America that leads the world in barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not until this president leaves office. And maybe not even then.

[Nickdfresh]

It's only torture when it was done during the Spanish Inquisition... :rolleyes:

http://images.wikia.com/uncyclopedia/images/3/31/Spinquisition.jpg
"HEELLLLLOOOO Islamofascists!"

[LoungeMachine]

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/news-desk/2007/11/2/bush-fumes-in-private-about-mukasey.html

Friday, November 2,


Bush Fumes in Private About Mukasey
November 02, 2007 11:43 AM ET | Permanent Link


Behind the scenes, President Bush is fuming even more than he has let on publicly at the Senate's delay in voting on his choice of Michael Mukasey as the new attorney general.

Bush feels that Mukasey's nomination has been held unconscionably long in the Judiciary Committee as Democrats tried to figure out a way to derail him, White House insiders say. Bush was already resentful that his old friend Alberto Gonzales was forced out of the AG's job even though he committed no wrongdoing, and the president tells aides he gave Democratic critics what they said they were looking for in a new one—someone who is independent-minded, has integrity, and is an excellent lawyer.

"He deserves a vote," says a senior Bush adviser. Senate Democratic leaders say a vote, at least in committee, will come next week. But Mukasey has riled some Democrats because he has not condemned waterboarding (an interrogation technique that simulates drowning) as illegal and a form of torture, throwing his confirmation into some doubt. Bush is said to be fuming at the delays and the fact that Mukasey was directed by the committee to answer 495 questions in writing after his hearing.

The president considered this overly burdensome and just a delaying tactic as critics fished for something damaging, which they couldn't find, the insiders say. Some of Bush's frustration came out in an Oval Office talk with reporters this morning when Bush said it was unfair to ask Mukasey about interrogation techniques on which he has not been briefed. Beyond that, Bush said, "it doesn't make any sense to tell the enemy whether we use those techniques or not."

—Kenneth T. Walsh






LMMFAO

I can just see the petulant little dictator jumping up and down screaming.

:lol:

[Jesus Christ]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine


Jesus Christ Chimpy is a fucking tool.



Indeed he is, My son. :(

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Jesus Christ
Indeed he is, My son. :(

I'm glad you heard me...

Sorry for taking your name.

How's pops?

Can't you 2 do anything about this administration?

A burning bush?

Part the "Red" sea...

By the way....

How did all of those animals find their way to that Ark?

:gulp:

[Jesus Christ]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
I'm glad you heard me...

Sorry for taking your name.

How's pops?

Can't you 2 do anything about this administration?

A burning bush?

Part the "Red" sea...

By the way....

How did all of those animals find their way to that Ark?

:gulp:

You know those "free birdseed" signs in the old Road Runner cartoons?

It was something like that......

[LoungeMachine]

FUCK YOU FEINSTIEN AND SCHUMER YOU BASTARDS


They should both be waterboarded. :mad:


Word is they're both voting to confirm.


FILIBUSTER TIME !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Jesus Christ]

Verily, this is the bidding of AIPAC.

And as the King of the Jews, this sickens Me. :mad:

[BITEYOASS]

The entire Bush family is cursed by the ghost of Geronimo! Cause everything they do is evil and they just get dumber with each generation.