The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday. [New York Times]

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

I joined working in the Obama Presidential campaign when I learned he eschewed taking campaign contributions from lobbyists. I have viewed lobbyists as corporate agents used to retain corporate ownership of the United States Congress. Bluntly, big corporations own Congress by using lobbyists to make campaign contributions to help re-elect Senators and Congressmen/women to office who help the corporations make more money.

I’ve posted blogs in the past stating that we ordinary people will have to buy back Congress so that Congress will have to represent us ordinary mortals rather than Corporate America.

In today’s Politico is an article that troubles me. I am troubled by Democrats looking for ways around Obama’s avoidance of lobbyist contributions.

Tonight there is a Democratic fundraiser scheduled to take place at some hotel. They call it an Issues Conference. It is an invitation only event—costs $5,000 a head to go. (You do have $5,000 laying around don’t you? But do you have an invitation?) I’m sure lobbyists have invitations and the $5,000 admission. The Obama rule is that no money be taken from lobbyists at tonight’s Conference.  So the Democrats won’t take lobbyists’ money tonight. But Friday morning, after Obama is gone, the lobbyists can line up with their campaign contributions in hand to pass over to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who will willingly accept those campaign contributions. See the following quote from Politico:

Please note that the Friday Issues Conference is NOT subject to lobbyist restrictions, though the event is intended for personal contributions only,” a finance official from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wrote in an e-mail sent to lobbyists Tuesday and obtained by POLITICO, bolding the entire sentence to underscore the clarification. “The Issues Conference is separate from the DSCC/DCCC events with President Obama.”

Democratic Senators and Congressmen/women are just as susceptible to accepting corporate contributions as are Republicans. Common sense tells you that those that accept the money will see that those that gave the money get the red-carpeted treatment.

We ordinary Democrats will take a second seat while corporate American continues on with business as usual.

There has got to be a better way to finance political campaigns. Money is the mother’s milk of politics. Obama’s presidential campaign demonstrated that us ordinary people can have our voices heard with $5, $10, $20 campaign contributions so long as we remain engaged and make such contributions by the thousands. Democratic and Republican Senators and Congressmen/women need to learn that lesson and gear their campaigns to appeal to the ordinary voter for their contributions and support rather than the wealthy corporations.

I don’t expect that to happen. But I think it should. Democratic politicians are following the same old path which leads to corruption as we saw during the Bush-Cheney regime. We never learn.

LONDON (Reuters) – Photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse which U.S. President Barack Obama does not want released include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Thursday.

U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba, now retired, said:

“These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.”

Taguba said he supported Obama’s decision not to release them, even though Obama had previously pledged to disclose all images relating to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others are said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

The photographs relate to 400 alleged cases of abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons between 2001 and 2005.

And Bush-Cheney look like they’re going to get away with it.

Many people have little knowledge about the judicial branch of our federal government. Maybe I can help a bit (just another friendly service to Nye-Gateway readers from Featheriver). That fellow in the front row, far left of the following photo is Justice Anthony Kennedy, my former Constitutional Law Professor.
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Former vice-President Dick Cheney, today, dismissed critics who said the policy amounted to the torture of suspected terrorists, Cheney said the methods were “legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.” He claims President Obama has weakened the country’s ability to combat al Qaeda and other extremists by eliminating them. [CNN]

The former vice president said U.S. intelligence officers “were trying to prevent future killings” and did not commit torture. But he defended the use of “waterboarding,” which the United States has prosecuted as torture in the past, as a valuable tool used on three top al Qaeda figures.

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Olbermann\’s Special Comment on Dick Cheney

Here is the transcript text of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s speech today. I haven’t been successful in putting up the video:

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about Mr. Cheney’s speech. Neurotic. Paranoid. False to fact and false to reason. Forever self-rationalizing. His inner rage at his own impotence and failure dripping from every word and as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane, as any terrorist.

The former vice president has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.
The delusional claims he has made this day could be proved by documentation and first-hand testimony to be the literal truth, and still he himself would be wrong, because the America he sought to impose upon the world and upon its own citizens, the dark hateful place of Dick Cheney’s own soul, the place he to this hour defends and to this day prefers, is a repudiation of all that our ancestors, all that for which our brave troops of 200 years ago and two minutes ago, have sacrificed and fought.
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It is very hard for me to believe Dick Cheney is trying to protect the “little people.” But that is what he is saying about the “torture” debate and investigation. [Huffington Post]

"This is the first time that I can recall that we’ve had an administration come in, take power, and then suggest using the power of the government against their predecessors, from a legal standpoint," Cheney said in an interview Monday. "Criminal prosecution of lawyers in the Justice Department whose opinions they disagreed with on an important issue. Criminal prosecutions. When was the last time that happened?"

As far as I’m concerned the Bush-Cheney administration engaged in a criminal enterprise. Rendition—kidnapping people and hauling them off to secret prisons in Europe to be tortuously interrogated. No charges. No trial. Just secrecy. Certainly was an un-American policy to me.

The question is “Who in the George W. Bush White House tried to shred a memo challenging the use of torture?” [Mother Jones]

Philip Zelikow wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. But the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo," Zelikow says.

Zelikow states he suspects the office of former Vice-President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up.

The Mother Jones article asserts “Cheney’s office was reportedly the hub of the Bush administration’s torture program.

Congress is now searching for Zelikow’s memo. Zelikow is to testify before Congress next week.

Someone in the White House tried to deep-six Philip Zelikow’s anti-torture memo. Welcome to the latest Bush-era whodunit.

Cartoon by Bob Englehart