(above) Detroit's BadGal, Re Ausektmt . My sister, My friend
My girl Re (Rae) of the blog BadGals-Radio, is kicking ass and taking no prisoners. Trust me, you want to stay on Re's good side! The posts below were too good to not share!! lol Sometimes you got to get down to the white meat and start dissecting-that's what Re does. Please keep it moving if you're in the mood to read fluff-it's not that kind of party right now. For the serious minded...read, comment and then visit Bad Gals Radio :)
Tricky Thursday BadGalsRadio Public Service Announcement
From: The Desk of Mama ASID - The defender of Anti Slackness Intellectual Development on a Global Scale
Date: Erryday - cause we always on the job
Good Day To You Mr President :
Sir, this is just not what WE had agreed to. I know you know that WE all know the difference between changing your mind and being afraid.. If You Scurd Mr. President - Call Black Jesus, He Got You..
Mr President, please study this picture very closely, because I can assure you that if you do not release these torture photos; this picture will include you next go round.. in a similarly attired and mocked fashion.
Make No Mistake Mr President, WE Are The Deciders; and We Want the Pictures.
FT.com / US & Canada - Obama U-turns on detainee abuse photo release.
Obama U-turns on detainee abuse photo release
By Demetri Sevastopulo and Andrew Ward in Washington
Published: May 13 2009 19:04
Barack Obama on Wednesday reversed his previous decision to release hundreds of photographs of American soldiers abusing detainees, in a major policy U-turn that was condemned by civil rights groups.
Speaking on the White House lawn, the US president said the photos would endanger the lives of US troops and have a “chilling effect” on future investigations into detainee abuses.
The Pentagon was slated to release the photographs later this month, five years after the emergence of images of US soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib shocked the world.
“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” said Mr Obama.
“In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them…would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”
Mr Obama originally decided to release the images last month after his lawyers concluded there was no strong argument to resist a court order. Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary who last month said it was ”hopeless” to appeal the court order, on Wednesday said Mr Obama had ordered his team to appeal the court order with a new argument based on national security concerns.
The White House denied that Mr Obama was capitulating to pressure from US military commanders who objected to the release of the images. Robert Gates, defence secretary, had also argued that the release of the images could endanger US troops in the war zones.
While the White House insisted that the reversal was motivated solely by concern for the safety of troops rather than political factors, critics accused Mr Obama of reneging on the commitment made on his first full day in office to bring more transparency to government.
“I will hold myself as president to a new standard of openness,” he said at the time. “Information will not be withheld just because I say so.”
UH RUHHHH.. WTF Did He Just Say ?? Somebody Get His Ears Tested, and then bring out them headlines of his pingpong; before he begins his immediate treatment with Aricept, cause he ain’t thinking clearly..
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the legal case that produced the court order, lambasted Mr Obama for adopting the “stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration”.
“If the Obama administration continues down this path, it will betray not only its promises to the American people, but its commitment to this nation’s most fundamental principles,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU.
“President Obama has said we should turn the page, but we cannot do that until we fully learn how this nation veered down the path of criminality and immorality, who allowed that to happen and whose lives were mutilated as a result. Releasing these photos – as painful as it might be – is a critical step toward that accounting.”
Republicans who had strongly criticised another recent decision by Mr Obama to release the controversial Bush administration “torture memos” praised his reversal on the photographs.
“I agree with the president that the release of these photos would serve no purpose other than to put our troops in greater danger,” said Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader. “The president made the right decision and I applaud him for it.”
SMDH, WTF Is In The Water in DC ? Now He’s Actin Like A Repiglican ? Awwww Helll Nawwww, this just can’t be. do we have a gemini in the white house ? please tell me we don’t. oh lawd Black Jesus Help Us Quick..
Releasing the photographs would have added further fuel to debate over the treatment of detainees, amid continued fallout from March decision in March to declassify the “torture memos” which authorised use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” after the September 2001 attacks.
Publication of the memos thrust the issue of torture and terrorism back up the political agenda and gave Republicans an opportunity to attack Democrats for alleged softness on national security.
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, has become caught in the crossfire after revelations that she was briefed about the authorisation of waterboarding and other harsh forms of interrogation in 2002 but made no objections at the time.
Republicans have accused Ms Pelosi of hypocrisy and are pressing for hearings to find out precisely what she and other Democrats knew when about the treatment of detainees.
The pressure of Ms Pelosi shows how Democrats have been put on the defensive over terrorism, while Republicans have been emboldened by opinion polls showing that most voters have little appetite for probing past abuses and are uneasy about Mr Obama’s decision to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Harsh interrogation techniques ineffective,’ former FBI agent testifies
“The situation was, and remains, too risky to allow someone to experiment with amateurish, Hollywood-style interrogation methods that in reality taints sources, risks outcomes, ignores the end game and diminishes our moral high ground,” Soufan said.
“It was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al-Qaida,” he said.
Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s point man in a battle to overhaul the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies, joined Soufan in criticizing the use of techniques such as waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that’s widely considered torture.
Zelikow said the U.S. could combat terrorism without resorting to extreme methods.
“Others may disagree,” he said. “The government, and the country, needs to decide whether they are right. If they are right, our laws must change, and our country must change. I think they are wrong.”
Cheney has argued that the now-defunct CIA program, which included a global network of secret prisons, produced valuable intelligence that thwarted terror attacks and saved American lives.
Cheney, who’s scheduled to give a major speech on the subject next week at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington policy organization, has called for the release of two classified CIA memos that he says detail the program’s successes.
However, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a member of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees, said he’s seen the two documents and they don’t prove Cheney’s case.
Soufan’s testimony apparently was the first public appraisal by a senior U.S. government interrogator who dealt directly with suspected terrorists in CIA custody.
It came a month after President Barack Obama released four Bush-era Justice Department legal memos justifying methods that included confinement boxes, sleep deprivation and slamming detainees into walls. That reopened the debate over whether top Bush officials should be investigated and prosecuted for their actions.
Adding to the drama, Soufan testified from behind a screen where the senators, but not the audience, could see him. Since at least one photo of Soufan is available on the Internet, the reason for the security measures wasn’t readily apparent.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who’s also an Air Force Reserve lawyer, said the Bush administration erred in its reading of the law but argued that harsh interrogation techniques sometimes produce valuable information.
He challenged Soufan to dispute that.
“I can only speak to my experience,” the former FBI agent replied.
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Graham retorted.
Soufan was a lead FBI interrogator of Abu Zubaydah, one of the first major al-Qaida figures to be captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The initial interrogation of Zubaydah, using the bureau’s traditional, rapport-building techniques, yielded valuable intelligence, including the role of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.
Then-CIA director George Tenet congratulated the interrogators - until he learned that they were from the FBI, not the CIA, Soufan said. A team from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center that included a government contractor quickly replaced him and his colleagues. They introduced harsh interrogation techniques, and Zubaydah’s cooperation stopped, Soufan said.
After complaints from officials in Washington about the dried-up intelligence flow, Soufan and colleagues reverted to the traditional approach, and Zubaydah began talking again.
To bolster the Democrats’ case against torture, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., released summaries of Soufan’s interrogations of another al-Qaida figure, Abu Jandal, who was a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden. Without being tortured, Jandal divulged intimate details and personal histories of bin Laden’s inner circle, the 100 pages of documents appear to show.
The hearing took place amid an escalating political fracas over what congressional Democrats knew at the time about the CIA program. Republicans say that documents call into question House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s contention that she wasn’t briefed about waterboarding.
Zelikow called the CIA program “a collective failure, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers), of both parties, played a part.”
Zelikow wrote a classified February 2006 memo challenging the legal reasoning of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The White House responded by ordering copies of the memo destroyed, but Zelikow said his six-page document has been retrieved from State Department files and is undergoing declassification review.
ON THE WEB
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=3842
So to wrap this up, we’d just like to ask you to take a moment and consider what this all means.
if the All of Torture Photos and All the Torture Memos are not released, that means in essence President Obama is going back on his promise of Transparency; and Truth.
He Promised to Get to the Facts in the Torture and Terrorism Cases. This is what we HIRED Him To Do. He Works For Us effectively as our CEO, and We Need to make demands as Stockholders of this terribly unbeholding beast that we allow to run our lives, with tacit approval.
Isn’t It Time Transparency In Government was The Rule not the Exception ?
What Do You Think ? Leave Us a Few of Your Thoughts, as this will become a part of our series “Neocons on Parade”. it will be released on it’s own homesite within the coming weeks. WE Know that Eric Holder has a special interest in certain tags; and we use them to make sure that this story and others in this series are reaching the very eyes, that need to see and know.
TELL EM, What You Think; Because They are behaving awfully shady, on this whole Torture Photo Issue. Don’t Froget that Prosecution is still up in the Air. When is Guantanamo Bay Closing ? have we got a date for Troop Withdrawl from Iraq ?
So Mr Obama - and Mr Holder, When Will the American People Get Justice ?
Check out a new blog which focuses on Black Celebs & Plastic Surgery: Black & Plastic and don't forget to visit my 2nd blog:Bria's Own Words
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