Paul O’Neill’s interview with 60 minutes regarding his input into the book The Price of Loyalty by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind.

This was in 2002, before the Iraq War. Before the selling of war, before the lies of WMDs, aluminum tubes and yellow cake from Niger. Before oil companies were swooping down on Iraq to gobble up production sharing agreements. We didn’t listen.

Listen now.

As the fevered pitch of outrage swept the nation after the events of 9/11, the dismissal of Paul O’Neill and Ron Suskind’s book slipped under the nations radar. As Scott McClellan whores himself out before the American people at $49.95 a copy, lets remember that Paul O’Neill stood up and spoke out as a person that loved his nation more then his party, who had the moral fiber to speak out and who is not so profoundly corrupt that he would wait 5 years to release the information to enrich himself.

To note, as we now read Scott McClellan’s book as to the details inside the Bush administration, Paul O’Neill did not write a book or make money from doing so. I will make this very clear to both Scott McClelland and ex-CIA Director George Tenet and his book. Reality is not a Catholic Church where you confess your sins and all is forgiven, it’s a confession of crimes committed in your presence and/or with your participation. Your books are confessions of your own illegal activities and I hope you are jailed for them. Without justice, there is no liberty. At the very least neither of you should be able to make one penny off your books and all proceeds should go to widows of or disabled Veteran care as that’s the result of your criminal actions. No one, not even high government spokesmen or directors should profit from crimes they committed. We are a Nation of laws.

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Fight the good fight,

erkd1

What an amazing trip this has been! After months and months of hard work, This Brave Nation wraps with its thrilling fifth episode: Tom Hayden in conversation with Naomi Klein. Hayden is, of course, the legendary activist who was a member of the Chicago 7 and who also spent 18 years in the California Legislature. Klein is the author of two best-selling books, the anti-globalization manifesto No Logo, and the recent hit, The Shock Doctrine.

Together, they cover everything from the tumult of the 1960's to protests in Seattle to what it means to be a true witness of the events around you. Spirited and lively, Hayden and Klein have one of the most compelling conversations of this series, one you won't want to miss.

Watch the entire episode.

If you've missed one episode of This Brave Nation, you've missed too many! For a $15 donation to This Brave Nation, you'll receive 2 DVDs of the first five episodes. Remember that the most important part of this series is the ability to share it with everyone you know, including a local school or library! We've already started shipping DVDs of This Brave Nation, so now is the time to get yours.

And don't forget to vote in our Brave Nation Young Activist Award contest. We've narrowed the list of incredible nominees down to just five contestants for you to choose from. On July 13th, when we bring you LIVE the final episode of This Brave Nation featuring 2 very special guests, we will announce the winner of the award.

Vote today and decide who the next Tom Hayden or Naomi Klein could be.

Sincerely,
Robert Greenwald and Katrina vanden Heuvel
Brave New Foundation and The Nation

"Print married with film. Film and print married with the internet. Internet married with text, audio and video. Text, audio and video married with ACTION. You don't need a user's manual to get the beauty of all this integration." - The Agitator review of This Brave Nation.

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THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!! Ron G.

Scalia Used False Information in Gitmo Dissent

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet. Posted June 24, 2008.

To bolster his argument that the Guantánamo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush: "At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantánamo have returned to the battlefield." It turns out that statement is false.

According to a new report by Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, "The statistic was endorsed by a Senate Minority Report issued June 26, 2007, which cites a media outlet, CNN. CNN, in turn, named the DoD as its source. The '30' number, however, was corrected in a DoD press release issued in July 2007, and a DoD document submitted to the House Foreign Relations Committee on May 20, 2008 abandons the claim entirely."

The largest possible number of detainees who could have "returned to the fight" is 12; however, the Department of Defense has no system for tracking the whereabouts of released detainees. The only one who has undisputedly taken up arms against the United States or its allies, "ISN 220," was released by political officers of the DoD against the recommendations of military officers.

Scalia bolstered his hysterical claim that the Boumediene decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed" with stale information that was proven to be false one year ago. Professor Mark Denbeaux, director of the Seton Hall Center, said, Scalia "was relying uncritically on information that originated with a party in the case before him."

The Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 decision that the Guantánamo detainees were entitled to file petitions for writ of habeas corpus to challenge their detention. More than 200 men who have been held for up to six years and have never been charged with a crime, will now have their day in court. Many were snatched from their homes, picked up off the street or in airports, or sold to the U.S. military by warlords for bounty.

Scalia, who sits on the highest court in the land, has acted as a loyal foot soldier for the executive branch of government.

This article first appeared at www.marjoriecohn.com.

The New Surveillance Bill: The Worst of Both Worlds

By Aziz Huq, The Nation. Posted June 21, 2008.

Months of troubled negotiations over new surveillance legislation ended in the House of Representatives today, with the approval of the so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Hailed in some quarters as a "compromise" after the capitulation of the Protect America Act of 2006, the new surveillance bill is nothing of the kind: on core issues of privacy and accountability, there is no compromise, since little in the measure honors those two values.

Since the New York Times's revelation of massive illegal surveillance by the NSA, electronic privacy has been a battlefield for claims of executive power and civil liberties. In 2006, the Administration used the shadow of midterm Congressional elections to stampede both Houses into temporary authorization of sweeping new powers in the Protect America Act (PAA). The measure's grants of new authority had sunset clauses, which expire either immediately before or after the 2008 elections.

The PAA set the scene for another legislative bait-and-switch: On the cusp of national election contests, the Administration rang alarms of crisis, claiming the nation is losing spying capabilities. Legislators inclined to protect civil liberties weighed their exposure to soft-on-security attacks against their allegiance to constitutional values. Either way -- in terms of raw power or partisan advantage -- the Administration and its supporters win.

House Democratic leadership agreed to support the measure -- seemingly out of fear of losing conservative Democrats to an even weaker proposal. But it is the worst of both worlds. It contains just enough of a pretense of accountability to allow the legislators to claim a victory for civil liberties, as it sells out core principles of accountability and privacy.

Begin with accountability. Since the enactment of the PAA, the Administration and its allies have pushed for legislative immunity for the telecommunications companies that aided the NSA's illegal spying from 2001 until 2005. (Those companies are the defendants in multiple suits, presently consolidated before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, challenging their complicity in past illegal wiretapping).

They argue that protection is necessary to ensure future cooperation, even though the telecoms were not deterred by the fact their past actions were clearly in violation of federal law.

In fact, immunity is on the White House front burner for wholly different reasons: pending lawsuits against the telecoms are the best opportunity for the American public to learn what kind of illegal surveillance occurred under Bush's watch, and how existing law against warrantless wiretapping was circumvented. As bad as the telecoms will look, the Administration will look worse as more of its cynical and results-oriented reasoning and contempt for constitutional rights is fully aired.

At first blush, the new bill seems to be a fair compromise. Under Section 802, pending lawsuits are not automatically dismissed. They are not even moved to the secretive FISA court, as an earlier proposal would have done. Rather, the district court in each case is required to dismiss a case provided that a defendant telecom can show that it acted with the "authorization" of the President and also with a certain kind of "written request or directive." The bill then provides an elaborate description of that directive: it can be from the Attorney General, or the head of "an element of the intelligence community" (or from their deputy), and must say simply that the surveillance was determined to be lawful. The bill does not say who must have made this determination.

According to a report in the Washington Post, this provision would give courts "the chance to evaluate whether telecommunications companies deserve retroactive protection from lawsuits." But the provision does nothing of the kind. Rather, the court can only look to see if the defendant has the piece of paper described in the law, and if it does, the court must dismiss the case. By interposing a certification requirement, and directing judicial attention to a piece of paper, the bill fends off judicial scrutiny of what in fact occurred.

And there is every reason to believe that the telecom defendants will have the necessary piece of paper. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the bill has been carefully written to track the precise piece of paper the telecoms have -- otherwise, why list both the Attorney General and the heads of intelligence community elements? And why include the weird codicil about the deputies of one but not the other?

MORE HERE:   http://www.alternet.org/rights/88973/