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One can assume that former Attorney General John Ashcroft didn’t mean it to be funny, but his testimony on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee might strike one as hilarious, were it not for the issue at hand — torture.
Ashcroft is the Attorney General who approved torture before he disapproved it, but committee members spared him accusations of flip-flopping.
Once again we're closing the barn door after the horse is out and gone.
In Washington, the Federal Reserve has finally acted to stop some of the predatory lending that exploited people’s need for money.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s call for a timetable on American troop withdrawals has touched off a dramatic change in the debate over the future U.S. engagement in Iraq – essentially, it marks a falling away of the fig-leaf rationales for the five-plus years of occupation.
As these fig leaves drop to the ground, they are exposing raw geo-strategic objectives that were present in the original calculations of Republican foreign policy experts going back to the early 1990s, a desire for a firm U.S. foothold in the Middle East to protect the West's access to oil and to defend the state of Israel from, then, primarily its Arab enemies.
Rebuffing Dennis Kucinich’s calls for impeachment hearings on George W. Bush, the House Judiciary Committee instead will hear testimony about Bush’s “imperial presidency” and several of his administration’s scandals.
In a press release issued Thursday, Rep. John Conyers, House Judiciary Committee chairman, said his panel will explore a variety of Bush controversies, including manipulation of prewar Iraq intelligence, politicization of the Justice Department, and refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations.
In the latest twist in the “Plame-gate” scandal, President George W. Bush has asserted executive privilege to block release of Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with a special prosecutor about possible criminal violations in the leaking of a CIA officer’s covert identity.
Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, promptly denounced the White House legal reasoning as “ludicrous,” noting that executive privilege covers advice that an aide gives the President, not responses to legal questions posed by a prosecutor about a possible crime.
You say you expected more rhetoric than reality from Senators Obama and McCain in their speeches about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that’s certainly what you got.
What I find nonetheless amazing is how they, and the pundits, have taken such little notice of the dramatic change in the political landscape occasioned by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s bombshell on July 7 — his insistence on a “timetable” for withdrawal of U.S. troops before any accord is reached on their staying past the turn of the year.
Most Americans who have followed the twists and turns of the Iraq War would agree that George W. Bush misled the nation into the conflict with false claims about WMD and Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda. But it’s less understood that Bush never stopped deceiving the public.
Indeed, one of President Bush’s favorite lines – telling the American people to listen to what the enemy says and thus to know that al-Qaeda considers Iraq the “central front” in the “war on terror” – has been every bit as misleading as his earlier false assertions about WMD.
