A convicted felon with delusions of grandeur

That it was published in the paper that used to be his own personal Hearstian plaything and vanity project must add insult to the injury of this damning report:

Conrad Black was not the model prisoner depicted by his legal team, rather he “projected the attitude that he was better than others” and treated some of his fellow inmates “like servants,” according to documents filed by the U.S. government in court.

In two affidavits sworn by a unit manager and an education specialist at Coleman Federal Correctional prison in Florida, where Lord Black spent 29 months, the former media baron is depicted as a haughty inmate and an uninspired tutor.

“Black initially demanded special treatment, expecting counsellors to prioritize his requests over those of other inmates,” said Tammy Padgett, the unit manager of Lord Black’s prison ward.

“During the time that Black was at Coleman, I observed that he gathered a following of inmates who performed services for him, acting like servants,” she said in a two-page affidavit filed by U.S. prosecutors in advance of a June 24 re-sentencing hearing.

“These inmates cooked for Black, cleaned for him, mopped his floor, ironed his clothes and other similar tasks. This is not at all frequent at Coleman.”

“Based on my interactions with Black, he projected the attitude that he was better than the others in the class, both faculty and students,” Ms. De LaGarza said in her affidavit. “A lot of the inmates looked up to him, and there were some who saluted him each day in class.”
...

Lord Black’s lawyers have asked the trial judge to release Lord Black for time served.

According to Ms. Padgett, Lord Black’s case manager while in prison noted that on the day before the Canadian-born businessman was released on bail, he told her in “words to the effect of, ‘I believe I should be addressed as Lord Black from this point forward.’ ” Apparently, the case manager refused.

Like Al Capone in his furnished luxury cell stuffing bills into guards pockets when they delivered his cigars.  Another petty, sleazy, grubby little criminal who thinks he still is owed the respect of the peons.

Option A or Option B

Ronald Reagan's conservative son Michael has harshly attacked his liberal son Ron JR for suggesting Reagan starting showing symptoms of Alzheimer's while still in office.

Nancy Reagan has not publicly commented on the claim made by her son, but the former president's eldest son, Michael Reagan, did. On Saturday he sent a message on Twitter reading, "Ron, my brother was an embarrassment to his father when he was alive and today he became an embarrassment to his mother."

Reagan, author of the new book "The New Reagan Revolution: How Ronald Reagan's Principles Can Restore America's Greatness" (Macmillan), admitted today that it was a strong statement but that "it needed to be a strong statement."

On CBS' "The Early Show" this morning, Reagan, a political consultant for the Reagan Group, said, "All these years I've listened to people like Bill Maher and other people on the left who inferred my father had Alzheimer's when he was President of the United States to somehow discount the great job my father did as president.

"So now for one of his sons to come out and in fact say, 'Yeah, he might have had Alzheimer's or he had Alzheimer's during that time,' just gives credence to people like Bill Maher and others. It absolutely offends me that somebody would say that when there's no evidence anywhere on the planet to back it up," he told anchor Erica Hill.

Of course he did robotically repeat the words 'I don't recall' or 'I don't remember' over 200 times during the Iran/Contra hearings in 1987, but lets put the best possible light on that and give him the benefit of the doubt; 
 
Maybe he was just a lying criminal committing multiple acts of perjury.

More on Darth Cheney's Death Squad

It's never a good idea to dismiss Sy Hersh, even when he says things like 'Dick Cheney ran a secret kill team out of his office and kept it secret from Congress.'

Various right wing meat puppets denigrated and mocked Hersh's claim - just like they did when he said American Forces in Vietnam had massacred a village called My Lai and just like when he revealed some of the torture going on in Guantanamo Bay.

You'd think they'd have learned to trust his grasp of the facts by now.

Reporting legend Seymour Hersh raised eyebrows back in March when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that Dick Cheney ran a secret hit squad that he kept hidden from Congressional oversight.
"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," Hersh said at the time. He added: "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."
"I said what I said, they can always say what they say," Hersh told The Daily Beast. "The last time they said the government doesn’t torture, this time it's the government doesn’t assassinate."
Some observers accused him of rumor-mongering and a top former military official threw cold water on the story, but with the recent news that the CIA allegedly kept Congress in the dark on a covert program, Hersh's words suddenly look more and more prescient. Yesterday, the New York Times reported the hidden program in question was a death squad authorized by Dick Cheney without Congressional approval—almost exactly what he described.

Cheney's Secrets

First there were the stories about the JSOC wetwork team reporting directly to the Vice President - now there's evidence that Cheney was running his own intelligence task force out of his office with the CIA and lying about it to congress.

The head of the CIA has accused former US Vice-President Dick Cheney of concealing an intelligence programme from Congress, a top US senator says.
The existence of the programme, set up after 9/11, was hidden for eight years and its precise nature remains unclear.
Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein confirmed that CIA chief Leon Panetta told Congressional committees he had abandoned the project on hearing of it.
He said that Mr Cheney was behind the secrecy, Sen Feinstein said.
There has been no comment from Mr Cheney.

Confirm our cherished propaganda myth...

...or we'll keep torturing you.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

They don't even notice the hypocrisy

Predictably, The Calgary Herald has come down on the side of protecting Canadians from the terrifying threat of a lefty British MP peace campaigner by barring George Galloway. In their remarkably pompous editorial today they call Galloway's barring simply the law being applied to someone who has supported terrorists like Hamas.

Section 34(1) of the act specifically forbids people who materially support terrorist activities from coming into the country. Galloway has not only publicly declared his support for Hamas, among other organizations, but he has boasted of providing these terrorists with financial aid. He is perfectly free to speak out on his support for them, but aiding them is in clear contravention of the law.
Galloway was scheduled to give a speech March 30 at a conference whose theme is entitled Resisting War From Gaza to Kandahar, sponsored by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War.Kenney's spokesperson, Alykhan Velshi, said the ban was being issued under Canada's "security laws," that"special treatment"would not be provided to Galloway due to his financial support of Hamas, which is banned in Canada, and also because Galloway "offers sympathy for Canada's enemies in Afghanistan." Galloway gave several thousand dollars to the Hamas-led Gaza government, along with several dozen vehicles.

This is the formulation preferred by Canada's Conservative government and the Neo-Con press. for purposes of propaganda it is superior to the just as accurate 'Offered support for the people of Gaza suffering a humanitarian crisis in their giant outdoor prison by providing support for food and medicine to their chosen elected representatives.'

Jason Kenney, the government of Stephen Harper and the Can West editorial board appear to believe their distaste for the Palestinian people's elected representatives thereby annuls that democratic choice. If the Western world wants Palestinians to elect moderates - push Israel to show any kind of progress to justify supporting moderates in the minds of the Palestinian people. Hamas, after all was the creation of the government of Israel and it's security services - as pointed out, among other places, in that well known commie rag The Wall Street Journal - in an effort to undercut the power of secular Palestinian movements.

They succeeded and now they and those offering them unstinting support have villains allowing them to tar all Palestinians and all those empathizing with their suffering with the brush of terrorism. The Herald finishes up with this spectacularly clueless display of cognitive dissonance:

No, this is not about free speech. It's about the strength and principle of Canadian law. Kenney is upholding it exactly as it should be upheld.

This is the paper after all, that greeted a visiting George W. Bush as 'a vastly important figure upon whom no comprehensive judgment can be rendered until the history of the next 20 years is known.' described his visit as a 'feather in Calgary's cap' and opined rapturously that Bush was 'welcome to speak' here.

Thereby spitting on Canadian and international law that requires anyone credibly accused of war crimes be arrested and prosecuted no matter who they are.

Call the two editorials the tale of two 'Georges'.

The Calgary Herald's righteous upholding of the purity of the law would leave less of a bitter taste in the reader's mouth if they hadn't made it so abundantly clear that the law should not apply to the rich and powerful known to have violated international law on torture, waged a war of aggression, committed acts of kidnapping and murder and spied on his own citizens, but should be applied vigorously to a leftist gadfly guilty of providing support to the victims of atrocious human rights violations who, more importantly, has said mean things about Stephen Harper and his government.

The Herald's editorial offers a timely reminder that the Latin root of the word Privilege is simply 'private law' - one law for the rich and powerful, another for the rest of us. To the Calgary Herald this formulation is so inherently part of their basic world view that they don't even notice when they are explicitly promoting it.

Scenes from Bush in Calgary

A warm welcome was provided for our visiting dignitary.1500 of Calgary's richest and most vacuous best and brightest were on hand to welcome George Dubya to our city at $400 a plate, no media allowed. Here we see them doing the walk of shame, the two hour line up around the block with hundreds of protesters doing our best to make sure their wait wasn't boring.
They were a fairly shameless crowd though, sneering as they shuffled past a silent witness.

Some of them actually had the gall to stand at the windows toasting protesters with flutes of champagne. This is who the song 'Eat the Rich' was about.A little after noon, my girlfriend who works in a building downtown sent me a text:

We can see snipers on
the roof of the Hyatt.
I'm being paranoid now.

Here's a blurry cellphone photo of one of the snipers on the roof of the Hyatt. He's about one pixel in this shot but other people photographed them too. Here's a relative close-up.

At least three Four protesters were arrested for trying to perform their legal duty to make a citizen's arrest of a known war criminal.
There were several hundred protesters at the peak of things and some of the highlights have made the international press. The elite may have rushed to sit at the feet of a war criminal but ordinary Calgarians stood up and said this is our city, our country.

And Bush isn't welcome in it.

UPDATE: Mom just called. No Mom, I wasn't one of the people who got arrested. Love ya Mom.

UPDATE 2: Olberman covers it!

Former US Attorney General: Canada Should Arrest Bush

Former U.S. Attorney General Clark calls for Bush arrest.
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen; my congratulations and gratitude to Canada’s peace movement and its many organizations and individuals protesting the March 17th, 2009 appearance of former US President George W. Bush for a speech at a “private” lunch in Calgary.
While the primary responsibility for addressing the Bush administration’s involvement in crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity rests with the people of the United States, because we both enabled then failed to arrest his acts, there is necessarily universal jurisdiction over such crimes if humanity is to end the scourge of war. We dare not blink at the magnitude, diversity and pervasive impact of the known crimes committed by the Bush administration. Wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Supreme International Crime, have killed hundreds of thousands outright, wounded, sickened and malnourished many more than they have killed and sent millions as refugees to neighboring nations while rendering homeless millions more.

Calgary VS Bush update

Today we hold his trial,

UPDATE (Saturday, March 13th):
Join us for the People Vs. Bush Trial at The Uptown Theatre, 612 8th Avenue SW. Doors open at 2:30pm, trial begins at 3:00pm.

And here's the schedule of events going right up to rallying outside of the Convention Center as he's speaking.

Here's where to send your old shoes. Many of them will be recycled after the protest... by being sent to Calgary MPs, and big Bush fans Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney while those in the best shape will go to the local clothing banks.

The Final Scene

With Bush finally gone and the horrifying truth beginning to dribble out about how far gone the US was the last eight years, particularly Sy Hersh pointing out pieces in the New York Times about an organization reporting only to the Vice President's office that was basically Dick Cheney's personal wetwork team, I feel like this apropo scene from the astoundingly prophetic 1975 movie 3 Days of the Condor is worth running.

Dick Cheney's Death Squad

Sy Hersh answered a question at a presentation at the University of Minnesota last night with a bombshell:

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...
"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

If you're thinking of rejecting this as too grotesque to possibly be true, keep in mind that Sy Hersh is the guy who exposed the My Lai massacre and the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

SEE:

• Welcoming a War Criminal
• The Final Scene

Welcoming a War Criminal

Canada is obligated by treaty and international law to charge George W. Bush with war crimes as soon as he steps foot on Canadian soil.

Bush is scheduled to speak at the Telus Convention Centre March 17, but Vancouver lawyer Gail Davidson says that because Bush has been “credibly accused” of supporting torture in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Canada has a legal obligation to deny him entry under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The law says foreign nationals who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity, including torture, are “inadmissible” to Canada.
”The test isn’t whether the person’s been convicted, but whether there’s reasonable grounds to think that they have been involved,” says Davidson, who’s with Lawyers Against the War (LAW). “…It’s now a matter of public record that Bush was in charge of setting up a regime of torture that spanned several parts of the globe and resulted in horrendous injuries and even death. Canada has a duty.”

It doesn't matter if it's politically inconvenient or potentially embarrassing to the current Canadian or American governments. It doesn't matter if President Obama would rather 'look forward'. It doesn't matter if prosecution would be problematic or be perceived as politically motivated - our obligations under international law and treaty specifically exclude all of these reasons as legal justification for failing to prosecute someone credibly accused of war crimes.

If Bush feels safe and comfortable coming to Canadian soil that is a black mark against our adherence to international law.

A criminal is a criminal no matter who he is.

UPDATE: As Mentarch points out in the comments the international law in question is also Canadian law.

UPDATE 2: See Paul S. Graham for more.

Shoes

I think it would be a very good thing for hundreds better yet thousands of pairs of stinky old shoes to be stacked around the Calgary Telus Convention Center on March 17th to show former US President George Bush the deep respect Canadians feel for him during his visit. Spread the word.

UPDATE: The meme spreads. See Kinchblog, The Unofficial Flames Fan Message Board and Five of Five. Join in!

Bush League Calgary

The incompetent criminal formerly squatting in the White House will be dropping in to Calgary next month for a private luncheon to pick up some of that sweet, sweet speaking engagement coin.

Being the first stop on Bush's lucrative second act career of telling bad jokes to wealthy right wingers snuffling over $1000 plates is an honor I could have done without for my home town.

All the news stories to date about our visit from the former chief chimp have been circumspect about the location of the event. Oh well, they'll probably make attendees check their shoes and super soakers full of cat urine at the door anyway...

UPDATE: The Telus Convention Center, March 17th.

New Rule

Any time anyone connected to the Cheney Bush administration says that something was completely impossible to predict and no one could have reasonably seen it coming - it was something that practically everyone saw coming.

As ThinkProgress detailed, Cheney deflected blame for the calamity on Wall Street and the deepening recession by declaring, "nobody anywhere was smart enough to figure that out" and "I don’t know that anybody did." Then, Cheney magically converted failure into a virtue and ignorance into a shield in explaining away the Bush presidency:

"No, obviously, I wouldn’t have predicted that. On the other hand I wouldn’t have predicted 9/11, the global war on terror, the need to simultaneous run military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq or the near collapse of the financial system on a global basis, not just the U.S."

At every turn, of course, voices both inside and outside the government warned a Bush administration asleep at the switch.

Counting the minutes

Clearing out the deadwood

President Obama's team have advised all of George W. Bush's patronage appointment ambassadors that their services will no longer be required after January 20th. Including this guy:

Consider the U.S. ambassador to Canada, David H. Wilkins. (No relation to me.) President Bush nominated him in 2005. He’s been a South Carolina state legislator. He’s a friend of President George H.W. Bush and raised more than $200,000 for President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. Ambassador Wilkins and his immediate family contributed $33,050 to Republicans over the course of the 2000, 2002 and 2004 election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Apparently, he’d only been to Canada once — 30 years before his appointment — as part of military service.

The Last Hundred Days

As of midnight tonight George W. Bush has only 100 days left in The White House.

He destroyed his country's standing in the world, destroyed his country's economy, very probably destroyed his party and tried very hard to destroy the legal protections and traditions of the American constitution. He will be remembered in history books alongside Nixon and Hoover for a record of incompetence, corruption and belligerence that the world can only hope we will never see the like of again.

We can only hope that Bush and his glowering, sneering consigliari Vice President Cheney will not attempt to roll the dice and redeem their vicious worldview with an all out attack on Iran before being evicted from the White House.

These aren't just supporters of bad ideas and bad policies, these are bad people and the world will be repairing the damage they've done for years to come.

Let them huddle in their bunker under the rubble as their long night approaches. When they're gone may we never see their faces again unless its from the dock.

America: Learn from this, learn from the drooling hatred and loathing we're seeing now in the crowds at McCain and Palin's Nuremberg style rallies. Banish these inclinations from your system and rejoin the wider world.

We're waiting for you.

Proof that Bush and Blair knew Iraq had no WMDs

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying with $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger). The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization." The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists with Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting CIA from conduction disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

$89,133

In the last 60 seconds, Exxon made a profit of $89,133.00.

Apparently... that just isn't enough.

How well did you do in the last minute or so of our oil-dependent economy?

(Posted by Matthew from The Church Of Mothra, Cliff is on vacation, and (to the best of my knowledge) isn't busy making an obscene profit while destroying the environment)