Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

The War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2441, makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment.

The statute applies not only to those who carry out the acts, but also to those who ORDER IT, know about it, or fail to take steps to stop it. The statute applies to everyone, no matter how high and mighty.

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.

The penalty may be life imprisonment or — if a single prisoner dies due to torture — death. Given that there are numerous, documented cases of prisoners being tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan (see for example this report), that means that the death penalty would be appropriate for anyone found guilty of carrying out, ordering, or sanctioning such conduct.

The general in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stated this week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials ORDERED that inhuman treatment and torture be conducted as part of a deliberate strategy. This confirms what the Pullitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam previously wrote.

Indeed, an FBI email declassified in December 2004 states that Bush signed an Executive Order authorizing torture (here is the list of documents obtained through a freedom of information act request, and take a close look, for example, at this one, which mentions the “executive order”).

An expert on Constitutional law said that only Bush could have authorized the torture which has occurred.

It has also recently come out that, even after the torture at Abu Ghraib hit the news, torture still continues at that prison and, indeed, the U.S. is still torturing people worldwide. Even to the casual observer, it is obvious that the administration has no plans to stop, but has instead been working tirelessly to make it easier to carry out torture in the future.

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Four-year-old could hold key in search for source of swine flu outbreak

Case confirmed in village in east Mexico where sixty per cent of residents fell ill

Jo Tuckman in Mexico City andRobert Booth
guardian.co.uk

A Mexican village whose inhabitants were overwhelmed by an outbreak of respiratory illness starting in February has emerged as a possible source of the swine flu outbreak which has now spread across the world.

The state government of Veracruz in eastern Mexico has confirmed one case of swine flu in the village of La Gloria with the sufferer named locally as a four-year-old boy, Edgar Hernandez Hernandez. The federal government said tonight that he tested positive for the same strain of the virus which has claimed lives in Mexico.

The boy’s case earlier this month came amid an outbreak of respiratory illness in the area in which around 400 people requested medical help. The boy was treated in hospital and survived. But two babies from the same village died during the outbreak. Sufferers complained of symptoms including fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm.

“The symptoms were exactly like the ones they talk about now [with swine flu],” said a local resident. “High fevers, pain in the muscles and the joints, terrible headaches, some vomiting and diarrhoea. The illness came on very quickly and whole families were laid up.”

It remained unclear tonight whether the illness was swine flu but the Mexican government appeared to cast doubt on its original diagnosis of the outbreak as a more typical H2N3 flu virus when it revealed that the only sample it sent to North America for swine flu tests came back positive.

“The sample of one of the cases, that of a four-year-old boy, was kept,” said federal health minister José Ángel Córdova. “It was among the samples sent [to labs abroad] and that came back confirmed.”

The Veracruz state government had previously said the infants died of bacterial pneumonia and said it has no plans to exhume their bodies to find out if the cause of death was swine flu.

Early today the US owner of an industrial pig production facility around 12 miles from La Gloria said it had found no clinical signs or symptoms of swine flu in its herd or Mexican employees. The world’s biggest pig meat producer, Virginia-based Smithfield, said it is co-operating with the Mexican authorities’ attempts to locate the possible source of the outbreak and will submit samples from its herds at its Granjas Carroll subsidiary to the University of Mexico for tests.

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PIONEER Since the financial crisis broke, Mr. Geithner has been the federal regulator most willing to “push the envelope” to look for answers, said H. Rodgin Cohen, a prominent Wall Street lawyer.

By JO BECKER and GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Last June, with a financial hurricane gathering force, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. convened the nation’s economic stewards for a brainstorming session. What emergency powers might the government want at its disposal to confront the crisis? he asked.

Timothy F. Geithner, who as president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank oversaw many of the nation’s most powerful financial institutions, stunned the group with the audacity of his answer. He proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system, according to two participants, including Michele Davis, then an assistant Treasury secretary.

The proposal quickly died amid protests that it was politically untenable because it could put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.

“People thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of out there,’ ” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, who heard about the idea afterward. Mr. Geithner says, “I don’t remember a serious discussion on that proposal then.”

But in the 10 months since then, the government has in many ways embraced his blue-sky prescription. Step by step, through an array of new programs, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have assumed an unprecedented role in the banking system, using unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money, to try to save the nation’s financiers from their own mistakes.

And more often than not, Mr. Geithner has been a leading architect of those bailouts, the activist at the head of the pack. He was the federal regulator most willing to “push the envelope,” said H. Rodgin Cohen, a prominent Wall Street lawyer who spoke frequently with Mr. Geithner.

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WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.

Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”

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by David Michael Green

There are few statistics as stunning as the following simple, single number:  The United States spends two times more on its military than all the other countries of the world, combined.

Yes, that’s right.  All 200 or so of them.  Combined.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, last year, the US dropped about $625 billion in taxpayer dollars on its military, while all the rest of the world together spent $500 billion. (The aggregate global figures come from 2004, but have been steady over the prior decade.)  However, if you also add in nuclear weapons costs handled separately by the Energy Department, Veterans Affairs, interest on money borrowed to fund previous wars, and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the total rises to a jaw-dropping one trillion dollars per year.

Think of how astonishing that is.

Imagine if you lived down the street from a guy who insisted that his house had to be two times bigger than all the other houses in the neighborhood, combined.  You and your neighbors live in 2,000 square foot houses, but he has to have an 800,000 square foot house.  That’s one that would be the length of three football fields long, and three football fields wide.

Imagine you and all your fishing buddies tied up next to a guy who had to have a boat that was twice as big as all of yours combined.  You guys have 15 footers.  His would be 6,000 feet long, or six Queen Marys, length-to-length.

Imagine that you knew someone who had to spend double on dinner what everyone else dining in a decent restaurant was spending.  The average meal for the rest of you costs 25 dollars.  This guy insists on spending $10,000 on one meal, of the same food, prepared by the same chef.

This is an astonishing ratio in so many ways.

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Decriminalizing the possession and use of marijuana would raise billions in taxes and eliminate much of the profits that fuel bloodshed and violence in Mexico.

By STEVEN B. DUKE

The drug-fueled murders and mayhem in Mexico bring to mind the Prohibition-era killings in Chicago. Although the Mexican violence dwarfs the bloodshed of the old bootleggers, both share a common motivation: profits. These are turf wars, fought between rival gangs trying to increase their share of the market for illegal drugs. Seventy-five years ago, we sensibly quelled the bootleggers’ violence by repealing the prohibition of alcohol. The only long-term solution to the cartel-related murders in Mexico is to legalize the other illegal drugs we overlooked when we repealed Prohibition in 1933.

In 2000, the Mexican government disturbed a hornets’ nest when it began arresting and prosecuting major distributors of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and amphetamines. Previously, the cartels had relied largely on bribery and corruption to maintain their peaceful co-existence with the Mexican government. Once this pax Mexicana ended, however, they began to fight not only the government but among themselves. The ensuing violence has claimed the lives of at least 10,000 in Mexico since 2005, and the carnage has even spilled north to the United States and south to Central and South America.

Some say that this killing spree — about 400 murders a month currently — threatens the survival of the Mexican government. Whether or not that is the exaggeration that Mexican President Felipe Calderón insists it is, Mexico is in crisis. The Mexicans have asked the Obama administration for help, and the president has obliged, offering material support and praising the integrity and courage of the Mexican government in taking on the cartels.

The U.S. should enforce its laws against murder and other atrocious crimes and we should cooperate with Mexican authorities in helping them arrest and prosecute drug traffickers hiding out here. But what more can and should we do?

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Ryan Grim

There’s freedom, and then there’s “total freedom,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told a right-wing news service, CNSNews.com, on Friday, engaging the outlet in a debate about personal responsibility.

For Frank, the free exercise of individual choice is legitimate, and should be made legal, as long as those decisions don’t harm the broader population. “I would let people gamble on the Internet,” Frank said. “I would let adults smoke marijuana. I would let adults do a lot of things, if they choose.”

That freedom ends when individual liberty imperils the global economic structure, he said. “But allowing them total freedom to take on economic obligations that spill over into the broader society? The individual is not the only one impacted here, when bad decisions get made in the economic sphere, it causes problems.”

Frank’s formulation echos the libertarian credo that one person’s freedom to swing a fist ends where another’s nose begins.

Frank raised the issue of online gambling, he told CNS, because his Republican counterpart on the Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), is a fierce opponent of online gambling while being okay with loose regulation on Wall Street.

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by: Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Three cheers for Dick Cheney. The former vice president has urged, however rhetorically, that the Obama administration release more of the torture memos. “One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” the former vice president told FoxNews.

“I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

News reports differ as to whether Mr. Cheney has formally made the request, but he is absolutely right that the American people need to see the complete record. He is wrong about what the record will show. From the material already released or ferreted out by journalists, it is clear that he and Mr. Bush succeeded in using torture, not primarily to secure needed intelligence, but to create the propaganda they used to sell their invasion of Iraq.

The evidence comes from a variety of sources, including the report on the military’s treatment of detainees, which Sen. Carl Levin’s Armed Services Committee has just released. The report revealed that Pentagon officials began preparing to use torture – or “abusive interrogation techniques” – as early as December 2001. This was less than two months after the start of the war in Afghanistan and eight months before the Department of Justice gave legal authorization in two memos dated August 1, 2002, and signed by Jay Bybee, then-assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. The first memo redefined physical and mental torture and suggested that the president, acting pursuant to his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief, could override the federal anti-torture statute. The second analyzed and approved specific interrogation tactics, including isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, which makes the victim feel that he is drowning.

If not the Justice Department lawyers, who gave the earlier go-ahead? The Senate report puts the onus directly on the decider-in-chief, President George W. Bush. He issued a written determination on February 7, 2002, “that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees.”

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Tell Chevron: Fire the lawyer behind Bush torture.

President Obama says it’s up to Attorney General Holder whether to prosecute the individuals responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policies. One of the top names on Holder’s list should be William J. Haynes II.

As General Counsel for the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, Haynes authored the legal strategy for some of the most heinous torture techniques authorized by Bush – techniques that were, according to the New York Times, “interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War.”

Haynes left the Pentagon when Rumsfeld did, but instead of going into exile – or better yet, prison – Haynes instead went to a cushy gig as chief corporate counsel for Chevron.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/haynes_chevron/?r_by=3666-446499-tcGOoEx&rc=paste

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Filed by Associated Press

The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.’s top anti-torture envoy said Friday.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.

Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal.

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by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

Speaking to CNN on Thursday morning in an effort to whip up political support for his prison reform proposals, Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) insisted that marijuana legalization should be “on the table.”

His bill, introduced late March, aims to establish a presidential commission to study prison reforms and drug criminalization and make recommendations to Congress after 18 months.

Senator Webb’s bill is backed by Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) and has reportedly received “quiet encouragement from President Barack Obama.”

Some other stated supporters of Sen. Webb’s reform proposals “include the current Judiciary panel head, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois,” noted the Times-Dispatch.

Advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition has also posted an electronic petition form in support of the Webb commission.

“With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different–and vastly counterproductive,” wrote Sen. Webb in a March 29 editorial in Parade. “Obviously, the answer is the latter.”

As a means of addressing the “national disgrace” — as Webb says — that is the US prison system, initial reports on the bill indicated that its authors intended for drug criminalization to be part of the study.

“Would you support perhaps legalizing marijuana?” asked CNN’s Kiran Chetry on Thursday morning.

“I think what we need to do is to put all the issues on the table,” said Sen. Webb. “You’re correct: if you go back to 1980 as a starting point, I think we had 40,000 people in prison on drug charges and today we have about a half a million of them. A great majority of those are non-violent crimes, possession crimes or minor sales.

“At the same time, we’ve got a situation with Mexican drug cartels conducting violence along the border, operating in 230 American cities, and we aren’t getting our arms around that in a proper way so, we need to put it on the table. That’s why we need a presidential commission to look at these things — people who have high stature in these career areas — and to report to the Congress on the best way to go forward. But, nothing should be off the table.”

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The derivatives were supposed to protect lenders against bond defaults. Who knew they actually provide an incentive to let companies go bust?

Andrew Leonard

As if credit default swaps needed any more bad press! The Financial Times’ Henny Sender reports today that credit default swaps may have left two big-name companies with no other option than to declare bankruptcy this week, instead of concluding out-of-court restructuring deals with their debt holders.

Here’s how it works: A lender buys the bonds of a company — let’s say General Growth, the huge mall operator that declared bankruptcy this week. But then, hoping to hedge against the risk that General Growth might default on its bond obligations, the lender purchases a credit default swap protecting against that event from another party, in effect buying insurance against the chance that those bonds will go bust.

But the kicker is that owning a credit default swap on General Growth bonds turns out to make the lender less willing to cut a deal that would allow General Growth to avoid bankruptcy, because the lender can get paid in full in the event of that bankruptcy by collecting on the insurance policy. So it’s better for the lender to force the company to its knees rather than come to a less disastrous arrangement.

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Shepard Smith’s days at Fox “News” may have to be numbered at this point. Even the filthy Judith Miller, for Chrissakes, is joining him in being appalled by the torture memos.

“If there was torture, there was a crime. If there was a crime, there were criminals who ordered the torture,” he says to the reprehensible apologist Clifford May before he and Miller both concur that these “horrendous techniques are illegal”…

But later, Smith completely blows his stack on Fox’s online-only show The Strategy Room, pounding on the table and SHOUTING: “We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps! We are America! We do not fucking torture!!!”:

(Hat-tips HuffPo and RAW STORY.)

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In this image released by PBS, a screen shot of the new PBS video portal is shown.

JAKE COYLE | 

NEW YORK — PBS may be cooler than you think.

Though long-form video on the Web has become all the rage in the last year or two thanks to sites like Hulu.com, PBS has been hosting full episodes online for years.

On Wednesday, the Public Broadcasting Service staked its Internet claim by launching a new video portal at . PBS says that by the summer, it will eventually host thousands of hours of programming. http://www.pbs.org/video

The portal brings together programming that previously had been scattered across numerous Web sites. The site gathers full-length episodes of shows that many would say are among the best on television, including “American Experience,” “Frontline,” “American Masters,” “Nature” and “Masterpiece” (formerly known as “Masterpiece Theater”).

PBS already has a channel on Hulu, a joint venture of News Corp. and General Electric’s NBC Universal, and it posts shorter clips on YouTube. But the new player, which will eventually include material from its 357 affiliates, offers an online destination for PBS viewers.

PBS says it’s finding younger viewers online.

“It’s a new audience for us,” said Jason Seiken, senior vice president of interactive at PBS. “It’s not our television audience watching things online. It’s a new and younger and more diverse audience.”

The portal is a component of a larger online strategy for the network. Last fall, it launched a video player for children’s programming: . PBS is also premiering the first episode of a new archaeological show, “Time Team America,” on the Web site before its broadcast premiere this summer. http://www.pbskidsgo.org/video

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by Brad Friedman

Why Didn’t Zelikow Resign When Bush Admin ‘Attempted to Destroy All Copies’ of His Opinion on Torture?

For that matter, why didn’t Condoleezza Rice?…

The former State Department adviser to Condoleezza Rice and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, disclosed at Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government yesterday that he offered a dissenting view to the torture memos and policies of the Bush Administration. (Ernie Canning discussed those memos and policies in detail here this morning.)

Zelikow not only dissented from the party line, admirably, but he also learned at one point that while the administration disagreed with his opinion, they were taking it a step further by actually going out of their way to destroy all copies of his memo. As he explained at FP yesterday:

At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn’t entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department’s archives.

While it’s admirable, I suppose, that he’s finally speaking up to reveal that at least someone in the Bush Administration dissented from their tortured legal justifications for war crimes, the question must be raised as to why Zelikow didn’t simply resign when it became clear that the administration was going far beyond simply disagreeing with him. They were stepping over what would seem to clearly be the line of legality, by actually destroying (or attempting to), all copies of his opinion.

Surely that was a red flag that something was gravely amiss there, no?

Zelikow was on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show last night (complete video and transcript below), and she asked directly if he’d considered resigning at that point. But I find his answer rather unsatisfying, in my opinion…

He claimed he never even considered resigning, because, he claims, he was busy working from the inside to “achieving major changes in what the standards would be that would govern what we were doing” in regard to torture, etc. at secret prisons, and that, in any case, “They weren’t committing an act of obstruction of justice by trying to destroy copies of the memos.”

They weren’t? Well, what were they trying to do, in that case? These were already “Top Secret” memos, so why the need to go out of the way to actually destroy all copies of his opinion? Zelikow’s further rationalization to Maddow that “they did not succeed in destroying all the copies of these memos” is hardly justification either for not taking some sort of public action to blow the whistle about what seems such an obvious red flag waving as the administration was attempting to destroy all copies of a dissenting view point.

Maybe it’s just me, but that sure doesn’t seem to wash.

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by Brad Friedman

San Francisco’s Green960 announces ‘Goddess of Progressive Talk’ to be syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks, home to Limbaugh, Hannity and other rightwing talkers

Updated: Premiere announces return date of May 11, show to broadcast live from D.C….

Following a nearly two-month absence from the airwaves, Progressive radio talker Randi Rhodes is set to return, according to an announcement this afternoon from John Scott of San Francisco’s Green960 (KKGN). She will be syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks as reported in a video-taped announcement just posted on the Green960 website.

Premiere is known for their national syndication of far-right talkers such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Dr. Laura and Glenn Beck. Rhodes, known by fans as the “Goddess of Progressive Talk”, had formerly been with NovaM Radio, which folded when she left, and at Air America Radio prior to that…

Scott’s video-taped announcement included the results of an online poll which the station had been holding to determine who would replace Rhodes after she’d left the air in February, during a fall out concerning her contract with Nova M. He had been prepared to announce the results of that poll today and that Rhodes was far and away the winner, when word came of her imminent return.

[Disclosure: We were one of the candidates on Green960's poll, and were just beaten out by a few votes by Rachel Maddow, according to Scott's video announcement. We have also sat in as guest host on the Randi Rhodes Show in the past.]

“What we were gonna do was tell you we were gonna try to get her back,” Scott says on the video before dramatically pronouncing: “Well, early this morning I got word from the national syndicator Premiere Radio Networks, that they were making an announcement today, April 23rd, that Randi Rhodes has been signed to a national syndication deal.”

“So we got lucky, and I actually mobilized the staff, and said let’s get this out as soon as possible. Randi Rhodes is coming back on the air as soon as possible.”

The precise date of her return has not yet been announced and there is no announcement as of yet on the Premiere Radio website.

“We’ll have more details on Randi Rhodes time and the day she’ll make her debut,” Scott promises. “Watch my blog every day on Green960.com and you’ll find out.”

UPDATE: Radio Ink now has Premiere’s announcement, noting she’ll begin broadcasting again on May 11 out of Washington D.C.:

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WASHINGTON — They may be held in low esteem around the nation, but the country’s largest banks still wield considerable influence in Washington.

The banks have made it difficult for Congressional Democrats and the White House to give stretched homeowners a stronger hand in negotiating lower monthly payments on mortgages and to prevent credit card companies from imposing higher fees and interest rates.

Having won some early skirmishes by teaming with Republican allies, the banks now appear to have the upper hand and may wind up killing — or at least substantially diluting — both pro-consumer measures.

To turn the tide, Democrats are calling in their big gun — President Obama — to pressure the executives at the largest credit card lenders. In coming weeks, officials say, the administration intends to make a major push on consumer finance issues, possibly including tough new lending standards for homeowners seeking mortgages.

Mr. Obama is set to meet at the White House on Thursday with executives from American Express, Bank of America, Capital One Financial, Citigroup, Discover Financial Services, JPMorgan Chase and others to discuss what officials say are abusive credit card fees and practices.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama made an issue of what he considered excessive credit card fees, but he has been largely silent on the matter since his arrival in Washington. As a candidate, he also favored legislation to make it easier for troubled homeowners to use bankruptcy court to ease the terms of their mortgages, a proposal he again endorsed last month.

Despite the president’s support and strong Democratic majorities in Congress, both proposals are in jeopardy because of lobbying by banks and their trade groups, particularly in the Senate.

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Sam Stein

stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

MoveOn.org is set to launch an aggressive new ad campaign calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the use of torture during the Bush administration and even raising the specter of targeting former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The ad, to premier on the web and blasted out to the group’s five million members, is the strongest push yet from the progressive group on this front. Set to a dark voice, the narrator asks whether a double standard is in place in terms of who has been punished for the authorization and use of torture.

“If you torture an individual detainee, you might go to jail,” the script reads, with footage of Lynndie England, the former United States Army reservist involved in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “But if you authorize an entire secret torture program, you get off scot-free?”

The ad then switches to pictures of Cheney, John Yoo and Jay Bybee — the latter two being top figures of the Bush administration legal team that rationalized these interrogation tactics.

“America is better than this,” the video concludes. “Ask Attorney General Holder to appoint an independent special prosecutor to investigate these abuses.”

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Huffington Post

A report released Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee presented new details regarding Bush administration officials’ approval of the military’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects. The 232-page, newly declassified report was approved by the Armed Services Committee on November 20, 2008, and had since then been under review at the Department of Defense for declassification.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, wrote about the significance of the report on HuffPost:

In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse – such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan – to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a “few bad apples,” were simply false.

The report revealed new information about the origins of the military’s interrogation techniques. As the Washington Post writes:

[The report] sheds new light on the adaptation of techniques from a U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), used to train American service personnel to resist interrogations if captured by an enemy that does not honor the Geneva Conventions’ ban on torture.
The military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) has been reported to have reverse-engineered these methods to break al-Qaeda prisoners. The techniques, including waterboarding, or simulated drowning, were drawn from the methods used by Chinese Communists to coerce confessions from U.S. soldiers during the Korean War — a lineage that one instructor appeared to readily acknowledge.

“We can provide the ability to exploit personnel based on how our enemies have done this type of thing over the last five decades,” Joseph Witsch wrote in a July 2002 memo.

What is perhaps more alarming is that few, if any, of the top officials involved in allowing the use of these interrogations methods knew anything about their ‘gruesome origins’ nor bothered to actually investigate what it was they were approving, according to the New York Times:

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Freddie Mac Official Dead in Apparent Suicide

By Tom Jackman, Debbi Wilgoren and Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writers

The acting chief financial officer of troubled mortgage giant Freddie Mac was found dead in his Fairfax County home early this morning after apparently committing suicide, Fairfax police said.

David Kellermann, 41, was a longtime Freddie Mac executive who joined the firm as an analyst in 1992. Police were called to his stately red brick home in the upscale Hunter Mill Estates subdivision shortly before 5 a.m., police spokesman Eddy Azcarate said. The call was made by someone inside the home, which is on a tree-studded corner lot in the 1700 block of Raleigh Hill Road.

Azcarate said Kellermann’s body was found in the basement. There was no immediate information about whether he left a suicide note, or what may have prompted him to take his own life.

Kellermann was named acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac last September, when the federal government seized Freddie Mac and ousted its top executives.

The company, along with sister company Fannie Mae, had made risky mortgage-related investments that were causing billions in losses. The two firms have received nearly $60 billion in government bailout funds.

Freddie Mac has been conducting a public search for a permanent chief financial officer.

Life has changed dramatically for Freddie Mac employees in the year since the housing market crashed and the economy entered a major downturn.

(Read the article)

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