Sir:

I have just learned of your statement in the Michigan group’s lawsuit attempting to undo the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. I should like to repeat the pertinent passage here, in which you claim there is “no need” to extend hate crimes definitions:

“Of the 1.38 million violent crimes reported in the U.S. by the FBI in 2008, only 243 were considered as motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation,” he wrote on the group’s Web site. “The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their Biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin.”

Translation: “Help! help, I’m being oppressed!”

Mr. Thompson, I can only suppose that by “Christians expressing their Biblically-based belief” you mean the part that involves kidnapping homosexuals, transporting them to the middle of nowhere, and beating them to death. Which is what happened to Matthew Shepard, and which has always been considered a crime in the United States of America. The law named for the late Mr. Shepard extends some special penalties, but is actually designed to let local law enforcement officials call on the technology and expertise of federal agencies to solve such crimes. Source Article

Eric Holder’s decision to investigate the CIA for abuse of torture may put the Bush administration under the spotlight next

Michael Tomasky

guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009 22.13 BST

The release of the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report, and the announcement by US attorney general Eric Holder Monday afternoon that he will appoint a special prosecutor to look into CIA abuses, is a fascinating high-wire chess match.

First, over the weekend, leaks of the IG report’s contents began to appear, notably in Newsweek and the New York Times, which made the leak the lead story in its Sunday editions. This is where the information about mock executions appeared.  Source

Huffington Post

Source

Chris McGreal in Washington

guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 July 2009 18.52 BST

• Ex-CIA officials say foreign leaders were also in dark
• Investigation demanded into post-9/11 strategy

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.  Source

NY Times

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.  Source Article

NY Times

WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

Source Article

Extreme Duress Could Yield Unreliable Information, It Said

Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 25, 2009

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as “torture” in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon’s chief lawyer and warned that it would produce “unreliable information.”

“The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel,” says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.  Source Article