Bush Administration

The CIA’s ties to the Gaddafi regime

by Paul Woodward 09.03.2011

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Central Intelligence Agency and Libyan intelligence services developed such a tight relationship during the George W. Bush administration that the U.S. shipped terror suspects to Libya for interrogation and suggested the questions they should be asked, according to documents found in Libya’s External Security agency headquarters. The relationship was [...]

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Evidence that former Bush official David Welch and US Rep. Dennis Kucinich tried to help Gaddafi retain power — updated

by News Sources 08.31.2011

(Update below) Jamal Elshayyal visited Libya’s intelligence headquarters in Tripoli, much of which were destroyed in NATO airstrikes. I managed to smuggle away some documents, among them some that indicate the Gaddafi regime, despite its constant anti-American rhetoric – maintained direct communications with influential figures in the US. I found what appeared to be the [...]

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Cheney reveals he was right about everything

by News Sources 08.25.2011

The New York Times reports: Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had [...]

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Avoiding impunity: the need to broaden torture prosecutions

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Marjorie Cohn writes: President Barack Obama declared “nobody’s above the law” in 2009, as Congress contemplated an investigation of torture authorized by the Bush administration. However, Obama has failed to honor those words. His Justice Department proclaimed its intention to grant a free pass to Bush officials and their lawyers who constructed a regime of [...]

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Torture crimes officially, permanently shielded

by News Sources 07.01.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes: In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House — announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution:  (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush [...]

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Costs of war: 225,000 killed, $3.2-4 trillion

by Paul Woodward 06.30.2011

On September 14, 2001, when President Bush shouted through a bullhorn to rescue workers at the ruins of the World Trade Center, he said: “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of [...]

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Missing Iraq cash ‘as high as $18bn’

by News Sources 06.19.2011

Al Jazeera reports: Osama al-Nujaifi, the Iraqi parliament speaker, has told Al Jazeera that the amount of Iraqi money unaccounted for by the US is $18.7bn – three times more than the reported $6.6bn. Just before departing for a visit to the US, al-Nujaifi said that he has received a report this week based on [...]

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Will Obama once again cover up Bush’s crimes?

by Paul Woodward 06.16.2011

The New York Times reports: A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him. Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of [...]

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Federal grand jury investigates war crimes and torture in death of ‘the Iceman’ at Abu Ghraib, plus other alleged CIA abuses

by News Sources 06.15.2011

Adam Zagorin reports: It has been nearly a decade since Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi prisoner known as “the Iceman” — for the bungled attempt to cool his body and make him look less dead — perished in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. But now there are rumbles in Washington that the notorious case, as well [...]

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Missing $6.6 billion Iraq money may have been stolen, auditors say

by News Sources 06.15.2011

The Los Angeles Times reports: After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born. Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo [...]

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The magical realism of body counts

by News Sources 06.13.2011

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: A gypsy named Melquiades who died many years ago in Singapore returned to live with the family of Colonel Aureliano Buendia in Macondo, because he could no longer bear the tedium of death. These are the kinds of characters that populate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnificent work One Hundred Years of Solitude. [...]

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Lawrence Wilkerson: for truth, justice and the American way

by News Sources 06.08.2011

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Libyan gold rush followed end to sanctions

by News Sources 05.26.2011

The Washington Post reports: Some of the world’s most sophisticated banks and investment firms rushed to do business with Moammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya after the United States rescinded the country’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism five years ago, according to an internal financial document obtained by The Washington Post. HSBC, Goldman Sachs [...]

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Obama’s war against whistle-blowers

by News Sources 05.17.2011

Jane Mayer writes: On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is [...]

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The cost of fear: How Osama bin Laden helped drive America towards bankruptcy

by Paul Woodward 05.06.2011

While most of America is celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden, it’s worth giving credit where credit is due: he didn’t just nurse a quixotic ambition — to attack the US economy — but he also figured out how it could be done and succeeded. Perhaps he was inspired by the AIDS virus and [...]

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Growing up in terrorized America

by News Sources 05.06.2011

The New York Times reports: Ashley Bright was 15 years old and on her way to school in Cottonwood, Ariz., when she stopped at a friend’s house and saw the news that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. At the time, Ms. Bright did not even know what the twin towers were. “I [...]

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Top ten ways that Libya 2011 is not Iraq 2003

by News Sources 03.23.2011

Juan Cole writes: Here are the differences between George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the current United Nations action in Libya: 1. The action in Libya was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. That in Iraq was not. By the UN Charter, military action after 1945 should either come as self-defense [...]

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Permanent temporariness

by News Sources 03.09.2011

Alastair Crooke writes: It was in 2003 that I realised something fundamental had changed. The door to the room in which I was sitting flew open. In stalked a figure still dressed in a dark overcoat and scarf. He evidently could contain himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign [...]

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Worse than Bush

by Paul Woodward 01.18.2011

While George W Bush was president it was possible to sustain what turned out to be a naive hope: that much of the harm he had done could be undone once he was out of office and the neoconservatives had been dislodged from power. But the harm personified by Bush and Cheney is now being [...]

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The tyranny of the national security state

by News Sources 01.06.2011

Andrew Bacevich writes: American politics is typically a grimy business of horses traded and pork delivered. Political speech, for its part, tends to be formulaic and eminently forgettable. Yet on occasion, a politician will transcend circumstance and bear witness to some lasting truth: George Washington in his Farewell Address, for example, or Abraham Lincoln in [...]

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WikiLeaks: Israel told US it would keep Gaza near collapse

by News Sources 01.05.2011

Reuters reports: Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday. Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables leaked to WikiLeaks, showed [...]

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WikiLeaks: US government, acting on behalf of Monsanto, targeted EU over GM crops

by Paul Woodward 01.03.2011

[Updated below] Make no mistake: Monsanto poses an infinitely greater threat to the world than al Qaeda. The US government still marches in lockstep with this corporate behemoth which is intent and already frighteningly successful in its campaign to claim ownership over the global food supply. The Guardian reports: The US embassy in Paris advised [...]

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Former CIA chief: ‘I thank god every day for the continuity’ between Bush and Obama

by News Sources 12.29.2010

On CNN on Sunday, former Bush officials lined up to praise President Obama: Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden, a retired Air Force general, also argued that Obama’s approach has been, by and large, the same — regardless of campaign rhetoric. “When one is in office, it’s, as the admiral has suggested, when one [...]

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Cables reveal Israel welcomed Hamas takeover of Gaza

by Paul Woodward 12.21.2010

If mainstream media reports and government statements could be relied upon, the Bush administration and the Israeli governments led by Ariel Sharon and then Ehud Olmert were perpetually of one mind — Washington simply mirrored Jerusalem. But newly-released cables indicate that when it came to views about Hamas’ control of Gaza, there was in 2007 [...]

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