This video from the USA is called Matt Lauer Corners Bush on Torture.
From the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel in the USA:
CRIMINAL GOVERNMENT BEHAVIOR: Bush’s Torture Quote Undercuts Denial
by Jason Leopold
April 15, 2008—President George W. Bush’s comment to ABC News – that he approved discussions that his top aides held about harsh interrogation techniques – adds credence to claims from senior FBI agents in Iraq in 2004 that Bush had signed an Executive Order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.
When the American Civil Liberties Union released the FBI e-mail in December 2004 – after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – the White House emphatically denied that any such presidential Executive Order existed, calling the unnamed FBI official who wrote the e-mail “mistaken.”
President Bush and his representatives also have denied repeatedly that the administration condones “torture,” although senior administration officials have acknowledged subjecting “high-value” terror suspects to aggressive interrogation techniques, including the “waterboarding” – or simulated drowning – of three [suspected] al-Qaeda detainees.
But the emerging public evidence suggests that Bush’s denials about “torture” amount to a semantic argument, with the administration applying a narrow definition that contradicts widely accepted standards contained in international law, including Geneva and other human rights conventions.
The FBI e-mail – dated May 22, 2004 – followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential Executive Order.
According to the e-mail, Bush’s Executive Order authorized interrogators to use military dogs, “stress positions,” sleep “management,” loud music and “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.” to extract information from detainees in Iraq.
The FBI e-mail was put into a new light by news reports last week that senior White House officials – including Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice – did meet secretly to discuss specific interrogation methods that could be used against detainees.
See also here.
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Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Dear Supporter
Thanks to a new report from ABC News, we now know that Condoleezza Rice led White House meetings authorizing torture that were so detailed, “the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.”
Watch the video: http://bravenewfilms.org/watch/26314240/35714?utm_source=rgemail
How can we express the terrible shock we have felt from the fact that our government is using torture? How can we express what so many of us are thinking-that it is absolutely appalling to know that our representatives are implementing barbaric instruments of torture as policy? How do we express our moral outrage?
Perhaps more importantly, how do we begin to take steps towards ending this heinous crime? Sign the petition and demand Secretary of State Rice to resign.
Our allies at True Majority, USAction, and Democracy for America have launched a campaign to START calling out our leaders by focusing on Condoleezza Rice. No, she is not the President. But we want to call attention to the fact that the Secretary of State called for torture when she was National Security Adviser.
This is our campaign to get all three Presidential nominees to call for Rice’s resignation. Accountability must start with her, especially now that she’s being mentioned as a potential Vice Presidential candidate. We want to push all the Presidential candidates on this issue. They need to make a public stance: Condi Must Go!
Join us in taking action. Join us in creating a firestorm while the traditional media is missing in action. Join us in spreading the word to mobilize our country. We cannot tolerate officials with a blatant disregard for human rights.
Yours,
Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New Team
P.S. Your support to get McCain to co-sponsor the GI Bill for the 21st Century has been fantastic-we had over 33,000 signatures that we delivered to John McCain’s office on Monday! But yesterday, McCain declared he STILL won’t sign the GI Bill, despite its bipartisan support from 54 senators. McCain has the unfounded fear that improving GI benefits would encourage our troops to leave the military and go to college.
If you haven’t done so, please sign our GI Bill petition now and pass it along to your friends. We must keep the pressure on McCain, whose hypocrisy on this issue is blatant!
—
Brave New Films is located at 10510 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232.
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Torture News Strike
After George Bush told ABC News he personally approved of the approval of torture – including waterboarding – you’d think the story would be front page news, not just on Countdown and The Daily Show.
But you’d be wrong. There has been absolutely no news coverage and a handful of editorials in the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer, Kansas City Star, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News.
If your newspaper is missing, help us organize a Torture News Strike.
http://www.democrats.com/torture-news-strike
Call your newspaper editor and tell him/her you are suspending your subscription until they give Bush’s torture confession the serious coverage it deserves either in the news or editorial section, or preferably both. Then call the circulation department and tell them to suspend delivery until further notice.
And post about it with your neighbors here:
http://www.democrats.com/torture-news-strike
Thanks for all you do!
_______
Torture Impeachment Petition Collects 25,000 Signatures!
On Monday, we asked you to sign our petition to Congress to impeach Bush and Cheney for approving torture.
Your response was incredible! In just two days, we delivered 25,000 signatures to our Representatives and Senators!
If you haven’t yet signed, please visit:
http://www.democrats.com/impeach-for-torture
Dr. Martin Luther King famously said of the Vietnam War, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” When our President and Vice President personally approve torture, that time is now.
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Posted by: “Jack” miscStonecutter@earthlink.net bongo_fury2004
Mon Apr 21, 2008 5:02 am (PDT)
José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco
By Greg Palast
Monday April 21, 2008
(for TomPaine.com)
Psst! George Bush has a secret.
While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.
You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.
The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.
Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.
And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”
Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on – in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.
Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.
Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does.
The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.
Say what?
As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.
Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab.
I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.
Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.
The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly.
So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico – at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.
Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.
Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”
***********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.
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