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Bush Administration

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Bush Administration

• Rawstory

Attorney General Eric Holder has decided not to bring any criminal charges against a former Bush administration official who lawmakers said lied to them in sworn testimony.

An inspector general's report found that Bradley Schlozman, the former head of the civil rights division, misled lawmakers about whether he politicized hiring decisions.

Criminal prosecutors eyed the matter but decided not to file any criminal charges for his under-oath denials of making personnel decisions based on politics.

 

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Bush Administration

• Rawstory

A Spanish judge decided to go ahead with the prosecution of 6 Bush administration lawyers — including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — who were the architects of the legal framework for President George W. Bush “enhanced interrogation” program, according to a report in the Spanish newspaper Publico.

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Bush Administration

• www.guardian.co.uk

Muntazer al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at George Bush, will be set free on 14 September. Martin Chulov meets the family of a man who who became a symbol of resistance to the US Link to this video

As his size 10s spun through the air towards George W Bush, Muntazer al-Zaidi – the man the world now knows as the shoe-thrower – was bracing for an American bullet.

"He thought the secret service was going to shoot him," says Zaidi's younger brother, Maitham. "He expected that, and he was not afraid to die."

Zaidi's actions during the former US president's swansong visit to Iraq last December have not stopped reverberating in the nine months since.

Next Monday, when the journalist walks out of prison, his 10 raging seconds, which came to define his country's last six miserable years, are set to take on a new life even more dramatic than the opening act.

Across Iraq and in every corner of the Arab world, Zaid

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Bush Administration

• Washington Post

From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish "enforced disappearances" so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently declassified by the State Department.

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Bush Administration

• McClatchy News

Karl Rove and other top officials in the George W. Bush White House were deeply involved in pushing for the ouster of several U.S. attorneys, notably including one in New Mexico, according to testimony and e-mails that the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released. Sworn testimony from former White House Counsel Harriet Miers revealed that Rove considered former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico a "serious problem" and "wanted something done about it" because of complaints about politically sensitive investigations that Iglesias had mounted. Miers said that she couldn't recall whether Rove specifically demanded

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Bush Administration

• TruthOut.org & InfoWars.com

 Nowhere is there a more disturbing, if not horrifying, example of the relationship between a culture of cruelty and the politics of irresponsibility than in the resounding silence that surrounds the torture of children under the presidency of George W. Bush – and the equal moral and political failure of the Obama administration to address and rectify the conditions that made it possible. But if we are to draw out the dark and hidden parameters of such crimes, they must be made visible so men and women can once again refuse to orphan the law, justice, and morality. How we deal with the issue of state terrorism and its complicity with the torture of children will determine not merely the conditions under which we are willing to live, but whether we will live in a society in which moral responsibility disappears altogether and whether we will come to find ourselves living under a democratic or authoritarian social order.

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Bush Administration

• Washington Post

Political adviser Karl Rove and other high-ranking figures in the Bush White House played a greater role than previously understood in the firing of federal prosecutors almost three years ago, according to e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, in a scandal that led to mass Justice Department resignations and an ongoing criminal probe.

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Bush Administration
Ray McGovern: My Take

So far the summer has been mild in the Washington, D.C., area. But for former Vice President Dick Cheney the temperature is well over 100 degrees. He is sweating profusely, and it is becoming increasingly clear why.

Cheney has broken openly with former President George W. Bush on one issue of transcendent importance — to Cheney. For whatever reason, Bush decided not to hand out blanket pardons before they both rode off into the sunset.

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Bush Administration

•

Democrats renew their calls for some kind of investigation and criticize former Vice President Dick Cheney.   Reporting from Washington -- Democratic lawmakers criticized former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday for allegedly ordering that a CIA counter-terrorism program be kept secret from congressional leaders, with two senators questioning the legality of such concealment.

A top Democrat called for an investigation. Republicans were far more circumspect, but some acknowledged the White House should have briefed Congress.

Exactly what the secret intelligence program was remained a mystery, but sources said the CIA had opened an internal inquiry.

It is unclear how wide an investigation lawmakers would like to see, but the latest controversy could fuel demands for an examination of the CIA's relationship with Congress during the Bush administration.

Congressional Democrats -- in particular, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of

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Bush Administration

• aljazeera

Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president, deliberately withheld details of a secret CIA spy programme from the US congress for eight years, a newspaper has reported. Cheney, who was vice-president to George Bush between 2001 and January this year, ordered the CIA not to tell congress of a new "counter-terrorism" programme, The New York Times reported on Saturday......

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Bush Administration
Ray McGovern: My Take

Editor’s Note: Prior to giving a series of talks in Texas later this week, the author offered the following op-ed to the Dallas Morning News and the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram. Both newspapers in George W. Bush’s home state turned it down.

Seldom does a crime scene have so clear a smoking gun. A two-page presidential memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, leaves no room for uncertainty regarding the “decider” on torture. His broad-stroke signature made torture official policy.

This should come as no surprise. You see, the Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum has been posted on the Web since June 22, 2004, when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales mistakenly released it, along with other White House memoranda.

The title seemed innocent enough – “Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees” – but in the body of the memo President George W. Bush authorized his senior aides to withhold Geneva Convention protections from suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban detain

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Bush Administration
Ray McGovern: My Take



Dear President Bush,

With this note I hope to make sure you know that I have been invited by the Dallas Peace Center to lecture next Thursday evening, July 9, at a dinner at FunAsia in Richardson.  You and Mrs. Bush are cordially invited.

In my remarks I plan to focus on the subject of torture.  I shall draw on my thirty years in Army Intelligence and the CIA, as well as a lifetime of trying to follow Jesus of Nazareth.  I will take issue with your decision of February 7, 2002 that the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (August 12, 1949) does not apply to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees; and I will explore the implications of that decision.

Somehow it seemed not quite proper to come to Dallas without letting you know this in advance.  I also wanted to tell you that I would welcome a chance to discuss these issues with you—either privately or, better still, at the dinner itself.

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Bush Administration

• RawStory.com

Judiciary Chairman won’t comment on what was asked, said   Former Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was deposed by lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said in an interview Tuesday.   Rove’s deposition took place over a period of some eight and a half hours, beginning at 10 a.m. and ending around 6:30 p.m, ET — and the lawyers took several breaks, Conyers said.   Conyers wouldn’t say what Rove told investigators or whether Rove would appear before his committee again.   “He was deposed today,” Conyers said in an interview with Politico. “That’s all I can tell you.”  

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Bush Administration

• MotherJones

Will former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other senior Bush administration officials end up in jail for crafting the policies that led to the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo? Spanish attorney Gonzalo Boyé is chasing after Gonzales and five other lawyers, and he has a chance—perhaps not a large one—of convincing his country's legal system to charge these former Bush aides with human rights violations.

Article Image Feature Article • Global
Bush Administration

During the past several months in the American press, the Democrats have frequently denounced the Republicans as Nazis due to their attempts to control runaway federal spending. How very ironic. I remember the Nazis. Let me share a little about them and recall some of their exploits.

First of all, "Nazi" was gutter slang for the verb "to nationalize". The Bider-Mienhoff gang gave themselves this moniker during their early struggles. The official title of the Nazi Party was "The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany". Hitler and the Brownshirts advocated the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, national resources, manufacturing, distribution and law enforcement.

Hitler came to power by turning the working class, unemployed, and academic elite against the conservative republic. Aft

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Bush Administration

• AP

A three-judge panel of the 5th District Court of Appeals ruled that Bush does not have to submit to a deposition from a former condo owner suing Southern Methodist University, the future site of the presidential library.

Gary Vodicka, who was forced out of his condominium by SMU to make way for the library, contends the university coveted the property and lied about its intentions.

 

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Bush Administration

• Pubic Record

John Yoo, the former Deputy Attorney General at the agency’s Office of Legal Counsel, who drafted the infamous “torture memos” that gave former President George W. Bush and CIA interrogators the legal cover they needed to torture suspected terrorist detainees, offered some clues behind the genesis of the August 2002 legal opinions.

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