All posts tagged "presidenceUS"
Rumsfeld's war »
“Top Rumsfeld aides were already laying the groundwork for torture barely two months after the 9/11 attacks, and just weeks into the war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s general counsel’s office contacted the military agency that runs the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs — schools where U.S. personnel and contractors are taught how to resist abuses that prisoners of war have been through before — in December 2001 to find out how the SERE training could help interrogators break al-Qaida suspects. Military officials at the time told top Pentagon aides that the SERE techniques produced “less reliable” information.”
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On April 16, 2003, Rumsfeld authorized 24 techniques at Guantánamo including sleep deprivation, messing with detainees’ diets and pretending the interrogators were from a different country — one where torture was even more acceptable — in order to scare them into cooperating. And he told commanders to ask him for permission to use additional techniques.
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By 2004, when news of the abuses at Abu Ghraib got out, the military had already grown accustomed to a culture of abusive interrogation that made that scandal possible — even if the Bush administration tried to claim it was a blip in an otherwise clean record. And as the Senate report makes clear yet again, that culture came about thanks to Rumsfeld.
YES WE CAN »
Images from the Barak Obama Campaign
Via Twiins
Bollywood is bidding farewell to the outgoing US president with its own take on his infamous Bushisms.
in
Bollywood’s farewell Bush handshake
By Prachi Pinglay
BBC News, Mumbai
The Co-President at Work - The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008
The Co-President at Work read the full article.
By David Bromwich,
Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic and editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform. (November 2008)
“Cheney was only the forward edge of a policy long in the works, which had been announced almost in public in the turn-of-the-century strategy document Rebuilding America’s Defenses: the most substantial work commissioned by the Project for the New American Century. Like the authors of that treatise—among them Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, William Kristol, Frederick Kagan, and Stephen Cambone—and like the adepts of American hegemony at the AEI, Cheney, before he took office as vice-president, had concluded that there were no necessary limits on US domination of the world.”
Books Drawn on for this article:
The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
by Jane Mayer
Doubleday, 392 pp., $27.50
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
by Barton Gellman
Penguin, 483 pp., $27.95
The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
by Ron Suskind
Harper, 415 pp., $27.95
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
by Charlie Savage
Little, Brown, 400 pp., $25.99
What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception
by Scott McClellan
PublicAffairs, 341 pp., $27.95
The Bush Tragedy
by Jacob Weisberg
Random House, 271 pp., $26.00; $16.00 (paper)
Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President
by Stephen F. Hayes
HarperCollins, 578 pp., $27.95
The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006–2008
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 487 pp., $32.00
“The man who held decisive authority in the White House during the Bush years has so far remained unaccountable for the aggrandizement and abuse of executive power; for the imposition of repressive laws whose contents were barely known by the legislature that passed them; for the instigation of domestic spying without disclosure or oversight; for the dissemination of false evidence to take the country into war; for the design and conduct of what the constitutional framers would have called an imperium in imperio, a government within the government.”
