U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in lower Manhattan. Republicans immediately went into their highly predictable panic attack. Below is AG Holder’s announcement:
As of today, there are 23 agents who are international fugitives after an Italian court ruled in the abduction of a cleric in Milan.
NYTimes Article:
An Italian judge sentenced 23 Americans to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction of a Muslim cleric, in a symbolic condemnation of the CIA “rendition” flights used by the former U.S. government.
Updates coming as they roll out…
First, here are the documents that have been released by the FBI detailing the interview with Dick Cheney:
BIG THANKS: To Melanie Sloan and the hard workers at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) for their tireless effort to keep accountability and access a priority. Without their effort much of what we know would be hidden and our work would be infinitely harder. We thank you CREW.
There are few aspects of the Cheney story as well as I know the CIA leak case. At first this case eluded my attention because I was more focused on the Iraq war, the lies that led to them and who was in a position of the most gain from this catastrophic historical decision. I remember early on that many in the media were more focused on Karl Rove than Dick Cheney. Names like I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were unknown to the general population, but Karl Rove..was a known turd. Blossoming from there we learned more about how reporters gain access to the powers of our government and are subsequently or consequently used by those powers to feed the media cycle specific memes and directions for the general masses to chomp on while the oligarchic powers enjoy playing out their various ideologies on the world stage.
Take for example the story of Judith Miller who was used to foster the case to go to war on Iraq. She’d publish what the White House would say, then the White House would refer back to their interview with her and say, “see..the New York Times said”…It is ironic that she would also become the face of the oppressed “journalist” by being thrown in jail to force her to testify. Dick Cheney used her via Scooter Libby to manipulate the public into views that the raw facts might not have yielded. Could we have seen a war with Iraq if the New York Times was publishing articles that remained in doubt about WMD? The NYTimes relation to the same Dick Cheney who blasted the NYT for leaks about wiretaps and other programs is something that journalists should study as fundamental ethics for the next 10,000 years. He hated them?
There were several meetings between Judith Miller and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby regarding the Joe Wilson article and clearly Libby met with her 3 times in the days after Wilson’s op-ed, “What I didn’t find in Africa“, published. All of these were intended to foster a story, false at the root, about the case for Iraq. The story that follows is one of the biggest betrayals of national trust in modern times. We will not understand many of its consequences for many generations, I assume.
We should still ask the questions about the motivation to invade Iraq. The CIA leak case is only one of its aspects but we can learn much about manipulation and lies through this case because it became such a public spectacle. We are going to be representing the case in detail soon on this website complete with documents and archival news coverage. During this, I ask that you consider whether it is at all possible that Dick Cheney could forget the key details that he tells the FBI he “cannot recall”. I ask that you consider whether a person so intent on pushing a nation to war by toying with the reporters’ drive for a scoop can so easily forget how he was Right In The Middle Of The Action?
Dick Cheney is a bald face liar about the CIA leak. I’m not going to make bones about it. He lied to the FBI. His case for forgetting was a legalistic avoidance tactic that doesn’t even fool idiot gumshoes on TV. Because he was not under oath doesn’t mean he didn’t lie or mislead without consequence. But we’ll consider the consequences after we represent the evidence.
Coming next, we’ll go back to the sworn testimony and evidence presented in the United States v Libby case and see if Dick Cheney’s memory can be restored.