Bad Deeds for 7-1-2008

McCain Truth Squad Defender Was Swift Boat Vet Member – One of the members of John McCain’s new Truth Squad — which his campaign says was launched to respond to unfair attacks on his record of military service –- was a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and appeared in an attack ad for the group in 2004. The group was created to attack 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry’s military service record.

 

McCain’s Failed to Pay Taxes on Their Beachfront Condo for Last Four Years – The McCains have failed to pay taxes on their beach-front condo in La Jolla, California, for the last four years and are currently in default. The McCains own at least seven homes through a variety of trusts and corporations controlled by Cindy McCain. The report notes that the McCains paid the bulk of their back taxes a few days ago after inquiries by Newsweek magazine, but they continue to owe additional taxes.

 

Homophobia Can Have Bad Side Effects – Auto-correct can be a very helpful feature of any word-processing program. But when conservatives use it, they run the risk of embarrassing themselves.

The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website, for example, takes its AP articles and replaces the word “gay” with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. It was reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

That means — you guessed it — the track star was renamed “Tyson Homosexual.” The headline on the piece read, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”

 

Cronyism in the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives – A former top official in the Faith-Based Office was awarded a lucrative Department of Justice grant, despite the strong objections of several DOJ civil servants. This example of cronyism further demonstrates that this office needs further additional oversight, and has since the start of the Bush administration.

 

How Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs – Democrats’ softness on the Iran-Contra report during Ronald Reagan’s presidency allowed key information to be omitted in order to make the report more bipartisan. The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council. The failure of the Iran-Contra report to fully explain the danger of CIA-style propaganda intruding into the U.S. political process had profound future consequences. It was the beginning of government links to Robert Murdoch (Fox News) and Sun Myung Moon (Washington Times) to promote government propaganda. In the two decades since the Iran-Contra scandal, both Murdoch and Moon have continued to pour billions of dollars into media outlets that have influenced the course of U.S. history, often through the planting of propaganda and disinformation

Here is the actual Iran-Conta report lost chapter

 

CIA Ignored Iran Facts According to Ex-Agent – A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb. The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. “On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,” said the ex-agent’s attorney.

 

Bush’s Top General Quashed Torture Dissent – The former Air Force general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, helped quash dissent from across the U.S. military as the Bush administration first set up a brutal interrogation regime for terrorism suspects, according to newly public documents and testimony from an ongoing Senate probe.

In late 2002, documents show, officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all complained that harsh interrogation tactics under consideration for use at the prison in Guantánamo Bay might be against the law. Those military officials called for further legal scrutiny of the tactics. The chief of the Army’s international law division, for example, said in a memo that some of the tactics, such as stress positions and sensory deprivation, “cross the line of ‘humane treatment'” and “may violate the torture statute.”

Myers, however, agreed to scuttle a plan for further legal review of the tactics, in response to pressure from a top Pentagon attorney helping to set up the interrogation program for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

 

US Held Gitmo Detainee On Bare And Unverified Claims – In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents. The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

 

Waterboarding is a Tragic Waste of Natural Resources – National Water Watch, a Washington-based conservation group, criticized the government’s use of waterboarding Monday, calling the practice of stuffing a cloth into a detainee’s mouth, immobilizing him, and pouring water over his face and body to simulate the sensation of drowning “a tragic waste of resources.” “The idea that the United States could condone the despicable act of squandering several pitchers of water is shameful,” NWW spokesman Gregory Hammil said. “It is amoral, unconscionable, and in direct opposition to all internationally recognized water-saving techniques.” Hammil recommended the government switch to more eco-friendly means of enhanced interrogation, such as waterboarding with a return-hose device in order to reuse old water, or simply beating suspected terrorists to a bloody pulp. 😉

Regards,

Jim