Sarah Palin was on The O’Reilly Factor Friday night for the second part of a multi-part interview (see our highlight reel of Part 1 here, and stay tuned for the Part 2 highlight reel coming later this afternoon).
When Bill O’Reilly asked the “very bold and fresh” question of whether she believed she was “smart enough, incisive enough, and intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world,” Palin gave a confusing if not entirely unpredictable answer.
To aid in the deciphering of Palin’s response, here is the transcript:
O’REILLY: Let me be very bold and fresh again. Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the the kind of spineless… a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fat resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I’m not saying that has to be me.
AKRON, NY– This weekend marks the 46th anniversary of President Kennedy‘s assassination in Dallas. Two days after the president was killed, so too was the man who shot him.
A Western New York man was not only there when Oswald was killed, he recorded it.
Within hours of the president’s assassination, Izzy Bleckman of Akron, just two months after being hired as a cameraman for Movietone News, was on a plane to Dallas.
“We just got off the plane, ran over to the Dallas police station and walked in about the same time they brought him (Oswald) out, and he’s being questioned by the reporters,” remembered Bleckman.
Here’s the guy who shot the president of the United States standing in front of me.”
Scott Brown: “What were your impressions of Oswald when you first saw him?”
Izzy Bleckman: “He seemed like that cartoon strip the Sad Sack, he just seemed like a mopey guy I thought. And how could this guy have shot the President of the United States?”
That was Friday night, Oswald was questioned by police on Saturday.
Reporters were told Oswald was going to be moved Sunday morning from police headquarters to the Dallas County Jail.
Sunday morning an armored car was brought into the basement to transport Oswald, but it’s a trip he would never make.
By the time Izzy got to police headquarters that morning, reporters and other photographers had staked out what they thought were the best location to see Oswald being moved.
“By the time i thought about how I was going to shoot it, there was no room left, there was no room left,” said Bleckman.
So Izzy and his Bolex film camera, moved over to the elevator where Oswald was being brought down into the basement.
Izzy was waiting there with a Dallas policeman.
“He gives me a heads up and out the door they came. I shot the shot, the door opened up and they turned to their left.”
“I then stopped the camera, I run down the hall, I cross the alleyway and I’m still cranking the camera because I don’t want to run out of spring.”
“Here I am going across the alleyway where I’m going to get my low shot underneath the CBS camera and wait.”
It turned out he didn’t have to wait long.
“I turn around and they walk right into my shot.”
And then it happened.
“Jack Ruby’s right there. And he steps in and I see something happening but I’m not sure what it is. A shot goes off, and then it’s mayhem and they wrestle Ruby down.”
Scott Brown: “The president had been killed on Friday, here it is two days later, is this whole thing kind of surreal?”
Izzy Bleckman: “It was surreal of course yeah, it was like a bad movie, if you wrote this out for a scenario they’d say get out of here with that, are you kidding?”
It was surreal, and of course, all too real.
And 46 years ago Izzy Bleckman was there, not only a witness to history, but recording it as well.
WASHINGTON — When Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, heard a few weeks ago that the House took less than an hour to unanimously approve an unemployment bill that had languished for a month in the Senate, aides said he did not know whether to laugh or cry.
In the polarized Senate, even popular bills and generally acceptable executive branch nominees that eventually win easy approval first have to crawl though time-consuming procedural thickets.
Now it is hard to see how Congress will make up for the lost time. While the Senate hopes to devote most of December to a landmark debate on health care, time is running out on a number of other difficult and significant issues that must be resolved by the end of the year.
What follows the Thanksgiving recess may be a headlong rush into a legislative train wreck. Among the obstacles on the track is raising the national debt limit, always a wrenching vote for lawmakers trying to avoid looking like out-of-control spenders.
Congress must also either finish seven more spending bills or pass another stop-gap measure to keep the government operating past mid-December. Provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire. Highway construction and unemployment programs need an extension. The federal estate tax will temporarily lapse without Congressional intervention.
To top it off, lawmakers also await President Obama’s decision on how to proceed with the war in Afghanistan, and they must decide how to pay for any increase in troops.
As they brace for the frantic finale, Democrats blame Republicans for all of it, saying the minority party in the Senate has slowed almost everything Democrats have sought to do, filibustering even routine matters.
“It has been a very difficult year on the Democratic side,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said Friday. “We have faced, again, this onslaught of filibusters and delaying tactics by the Republicans. That it would take four weeks for us to extend unemployment benefits in the worst recession since our Great Depression is an indication of the extremes that the Republican Senate leadership has gone to.”
Republicans do not see it that way. They say Democrats have caused some of the delays by feuding among themselves, failing to use their 60-seat majority to full advantage. They say that in the debates on the unemployment bill and other issues, Democrats refused to let them offer amendments out of a desire to avoid politically treacherous votes. If they delayed, Republicans say, it was only in an attempt to be heard.
And now the Republicans say that if they want to clear the calendar, Democrats ought to scrap the health care legislation and focus on the more pressing issues of the moment, like the spending bills and the Patriot Act.
“That’s what we ought to be doing,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said Friday. “It would probably take from now until Christmas to do all of these measures that we should be dealing with. Instead, we’re spending time trying to do something the American people clearly don’t want.”
And when Republicans see something that they think the public does not want — or that they themselves do not want — they do not consider it their obligation to help Democrats advance what they view as flawed policy.
“It is true that we have not helped them do bad things,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell.
While Republicans dispute that they are pure obstructionists, there is evidence to suggest that they are using their procedural power to slow even legislation and nominations that they know they have no chance of blocking. And in some cases, many Republicans do not truly expect to prevail.
So far this year, according to the official Senate count, there have been 33 votes on cloture, the mechanism for ending a filibuster against a bill or a nominee. On those votes, Democrats have triumphed 29 times. That the Democrats held together means that most of these matters were not particularly tough.
Even more telling is the fact that some of the cloture motions were overwhelmingly approved with 70 and even 80 votes — far above the minimum 60 that are required to cut off debate and force a vote.
Democrats say that proves what the opposition is really up to. In their view, the Republicans, unable to prevent most legislation or Obama nominees from advancing, are running out the clock on virtually every play.
“Over and over again, we are seeing tactics to simply slow the Senate down,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and a diligent chronicler of Republican objections. She pointed out that after initial procedural hurdles were surmounted, “people have been confirmed overwhelmingly, if not unanimously, and the same is true for legislation.”
But the Democrats say it is going to take cooperation to finish off the pending business. Given the shortage of that commodity in Congress so far this year, a messy end to 2009 may lie ahead.
Read the (draft) Senate Bill on the new Healthcare Plan by clicking here(PDF format)
WASHINGTON — In the beginning, the Obama Administration directed a spotlight toward its careful, thoughtful decision-making process on Afghanistan. National security meetings were announced, photographed and highlighted in background briefings to the media. President Obama would apply the methods of the academy to the art of war — the University of Chicago meets West Point — thus assuring a skittish public that deliberation had preceded decision.
Now the president and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are desperately trying to jerk the spotlight away from a dysfunctional Afghan decision-making process in which chaos has preceded choice, complicating every possible outcome.
Gates is “appalled by the amount of leaking that has been going on,” which would be, if the culprits are discovered, “a career-ender.” Obama recently added, “I think I am angrier than Bob Gates about it.” They should be appalled and angry at the process they created — as should the rest of the country.
Sometimes government leaks are merely self-serving, reflecting the powerful passion of midlevel functionaries to appear in the know. But leaks in this process have been attempts to rig the outcome of a national security decision.
This summer, nameless White House officials began leaking their skepticism of plans for troop increases. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s assessment, calling for a more troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy, was leaked. Then a leak of internal government reviews on the poor state of the Afghan military and police forces. Then a leak from “informed sources” that Obama had settled on a troop increase of 34,000. Then the leak that Obama had rejected all the military options on the table and was insisting on refinements. Then the leak of two classified cables from Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, which cautioned against troop increases, leaving McChrystal, according to another nameless source, feeling “stabbed in the back.”
The Afghan policy process has resulted in more leaks than Oktoberfest. Leaks are a form of disloyalty — an attempt to box in the president of the United States, a mini-coup in which unelected officials attempt to substitute their judgment for the president’s own. Leaks increase tension and anger, then leave the losing side in a debate publicly humiliated and perhaps alienated from the outcome. Depending on that outcome, Obama will be vulnerable to charges of buckling to military pressure or disregarding the advice of his commanders.
Though leaks are bad for the president and the country, they are gifts for journalists and commentators, who often draw their purpose from the failures of others. We have learned that Obama’s national security team is both deeply divided and playing for blood. Military-civilian tensions are growing and have become reflected on the ground in Afghanistan. One key to the success of the surge in Iraq was the close cooperation of Gen. David Petraeus, in charge of military operations, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who led the civilian efforts. McChrystal and Eikenberry seem to have a different relationship.
We have also learned that military and civilian timelines are quickly diverging. In his strategy memo sent on Aug. 30, McChrystal warned: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” At that time, I talked to administration officials who were hoping the scale-up of troops would begin in earnest before the end of the year. Soon, three months will have passed since McChrystal made his dire assessment — three months of leaks and recriminations that must give pause to our troops and encouragement to our enemies. While it is important to get a military decision right, it is also possible for the right decision to come too late.
It is not fair that large presidential choices must be made with insufficient time and information, but it is also not unusual. A dysfunctional process on Afghanistan has begun to narrow the range of good outcomes. The time and the options in Afghanistan are limited. “As an analogy,” says David Kilcullen, an expert on counterinsurgency strategy, “you have a building on fire, and it’s got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave. It is not appropriate to stand outside pontificating about not taking lightly the responsibility of sending firemen into harm’s way. Either put in enough firemen to put the fire out or get out of the house.”
Ever since that awful day that changed America, the so-call “War on Terrorism” has nothing more but a huge and corrupted joke to America. C’mon folks, we need to be soft on other race in the world, so we won’t “offend” anyone ? What the fuck is that all about ?
It’s not like America has been “secretly” funding terrorist network (for the past 30 or 40 years), but yet send our troops out to kill them. Yeah, and that’s all Politics ? I say, “BULLSHIT !” It’s much more than a “political charade” these government officials have been playing for the past 9 years !
In my opinion, September 11, 2001 was just an enormous cover-up, to show America what is really lies ahead. A much more devastating “appetite for destruction” to be seen on our American soil. Now, whether that was just a warning, or not. It will send a strong message, AMERICA better wake up ! That includes all government officials, there won’t be much of America standing, if these government officials refuse to protect their own country.
(Perhaps, these government officials really don’t want to ! Perhaps, just maybe … they could care less if America falls down to her knees. And, someday will bow down to other religious leaders – Like the Muslim community.)
The War on Terrorism has been nothing more than a “Swiss Bank” to fund our fellow terrorists, and blow them up with the weapons we spent with the money we spent on, funding them in the first place. What a fucking country, huh ?!!! Talk about a true American “Double Standard”.
WASHINGTON — In a move both politically and legally risky, the Obama administration plans to put on trial the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and four alleged accomplices in a lower Manhattan courthouse.
The venue for the biggest trial in the age of terrorism means prosecutors must balance difficult issues such as rough treatment of detainees and sensitive intelligence-gathering with the Justice Department’s desire to prove that the federal courts are able to handle terrorism cases.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial in a courtroom barely a thousand yards from the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers they are accused of destroying.
Trying the men in civilian court will bar evidence obtained under duress and complicate a case where anything short of slam-dunk convictions will empower President Barack Obama’s critics. U.S. civilian courts prohibit evidence obtained through coercion, and a number of detainees were questioned using harsh methods some call torture.
Holder insisted both the court system and the untainted evidence against the five men are strong enough to deliver a guilty verdict and the penalty he expects to seek: a death sentence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people who were killed when four hijacked jetliners slammed into the towers, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.
“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York – to New York,” Holder repeated for emphasis, “to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”
Holder said he decided to bring Mohammed and the other four before a civilian court rather than a military commission because of the nature of the undisclosed evidence against them, because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil.
Lawyers for the accused will almost certainly try to have charges thrown out based on the rough treatment of the detainees at the hands of U.S. interrogators, including the repeated waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of Mohammed.
The question has been raised as to whether the government can make its case without using coerced confessions, but prosecutors have other evidence including a written confession from Mohammed and other statements and documents to bolster their case.
Held at Guantanamo since September 2006, Mohammed said in military proceedings there that he wanted to plead guilty and be executed to achieve what he views as martyrdom. In a letter from him released by the war crimes court, he referred to the attacks as a “noble victory” and urged U.S. authorities to “pass your sentence on me and give me no respite.”
Holder insisted the case is on firm legal footing, but he acknowledged the political ground may be more shaky when it comes to bringing feared al-Qaida terrorists to U.S. soil.
“To the extent that there are political consequences, I’ll just have to take my lumps,” he said. But any political consequences will reach beyond Holder to his boss, Obama.
Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama’s plan to close the military-run detention center in Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the prison by next Jan. 22, but the administration is not expected to meet that deadline.
Obama said he is “absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people will insist on it and my administration will insist on it.”
The five suspects headed to New York are likely to face thousands of counts of murder and conspiracy. Mohammed and the four others – Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali – are all accused of orchestrating the 2001 attacks.
The government also announced five other Guantanamo detainees, including the alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, would be sent to military commissions to face charges.
I believe that the Obama wants to try the Bush Administration for War Crimes for their “secretive” role in the torturing of prisoners at Gitmo, Afghanistan and in Iraq. When George W. Bush was in office along with former V.P. Dick Cheney.
That should really work out for those guys, huh ? Why not ? It all happened under Bush’s watch.
Submitted by administrator on Wed, 2006-09-13 01:27. Commission Finds President George W. Bush and His Administration Guilty of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
The Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration released its final verdict on Wednesday, September 13, 2006.
Find the full text of the verdict in PDF form here.
An unprecedented Commission of Inquiry has found the President of the United States and his administration guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The five-member panel of jurists unanimously found the administration’s actions “shock the conscience of humanity” in five areas – wars of aggression, illegal detention and torture, suppression of science and catastrophic policies on global warming, potentially genocidal abstinence-only policies imposed on HIV/AIDS prevention programs in the Third World, and the abandonment of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.
A delegation, headed by 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern and former US diplomat and retired US Army Reserve Colonel Ann Wright, will deliver the verdict to the gates of the White House at noon today following an 11AM press conference.
THE VERDICT
In their summary, the Commission jurists found that: “Each of these constitutes a shocking crime in itself, and taken together the full horrors are all the more unconscionable. It is also clear that this is an administration that demonstrates an utter disregard for truth and flagrantly lies about the reasons for its actions.
“In arriving at this decision the jurists were particularly alarmed by the degree to which the Bush Administration’s actions in all five indictments were informed by the extreme right. …. although the specific conduct differs among the indictments, the result is the same: human life was debased and devalued by gratuitous acts of violence, torture, narrow self interest, indifference, and disregard.”
In arriving at their verdict, the Commission’s panel of jurists examined a wealth of evidence with care and rigor. Consistent standards were employed, with well-established international law referenced where applicable
The panel of jurists consisted of Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, William H. Bowen School of Law, Little Rock; former executive director, National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL). Dennis Brutus, former prisoner, Robben Island (South Africa), poet, professor emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. Abdeen Jabara, former president, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Ajamu Sankofa, former executive director, Physicians for Social Responsibility-NY. Ann Wright, former US diplomat and retired US Army Reserve Colonel.
THE HEARINGS
The Commission’s year-long investigation included five days of public hearings in October 2005 and January 2006 in New York City. The 45 expert and first-hand witnesses included former commander of Abu Ghraib prison Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, former UN official Denis Halliday, former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, Guantanamo prisoners’ lawyer Barbara Olshansky, and Katrina survivors.
The verdict’s release comes with war crimes again on front pages following President Bush’s defense of secret prisons, rendition, and practices constituting torture under existing law, his demand that the War Crimes Act be fundamentally weakened, and his threats against Iran.
In a preface to the printed verdict, historian Howard Zinn writes: “The Bush Administration has been following a course, which can only now be described as a series of crimes against humanity. . . . What could be a higher crime than sending the young people of the country into a war against a small country on the other side of the world, which is no danger to the United States, and in fact a war which is condemned by people all over the world and a war which results in, not only the loss of American lives and the crippling of young Americans, but results in the loss of huge numbers of people in Iraq? These are high crimes.”
NEW YORK — The move to put the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind on trial just blocks from ground zero raises a host of legal, political and security questions, chief among them: Can a fair-minded jury be found in a city still nursing deep wounds from the attack on the World Trade Center?
Some also worry that the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will make New York an even bigger terrorist target, and that he will use the proceedings to incite more violence against Americans.
The loudest protests Friday came from relatives of the victims, many of whom oppose any civilian trial for terror suspects — especially at the federal courthouse 1,000 yards from the spot where nearly 3,000 people died.
“If we have to bring them to the United States, New York City is not the place to have it, let alone in a courthouse that is in the shadows of the twin towers,” said Lee Ielpi, whose firefighter son died in the 9/11 attacks. The city’s wounds, he said, are simply still too raw.
“Ripping that scab open will create a tremendous hardship,” he said.
Some city leaders seemed to relish the chance to hold the evildoers accountable at the scene of the crime.
“It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly also said that holding the trial in the city most devastated by the 2001 attack is appropriate, and he pronounced the Police Department prepared to meet any security challenge.
It may be years before Mohammed is brought to trial, and there is no guarantee the proceedings will actually be held in the city.
A defense attorney is almost certain to ask the judge to move the proceedings to someplace less likely to produce a jury tainted by extreme hatred of the defendant, said James Benjamin, a New York City lawyer who has studied terrorism prosecutions.
Still, he added, the city has handled big terrorism cases before.
Trials arising from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and another plot to attack city landmarks were held in federal court in New York.
Manhattan has jails ready to receive Mohammed. Terrorism defendants have been taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center — an austere, 10-story building next to the courthouse — and placed in solitary confinement in 10 South, a cellblock for high-risk prisoners.
For the 2001 trial in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, spectators had to pass through two sets of metal detectors, the courtroom and surrounding hallways were monitored around the clock, and videotape recorded any movements.
The defendants were strip-searched before being led through a passageway connecting the jail to the courthouse. Their feet were shackled throughout the proceedings, the chains shielded from the jury by a curtain attached to the defense table.
“The courts have handled many sensational cases fairly and effectively over the years,” Benjamin said.
Civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, said Muhammad is likely to be treated more fairly in New York, despite the hatred for him here, than he would before a military tribunal.
In announcing that Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be brought to trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder expressed confidence that a “searching, complete” selection process would produce a fair-minded jury.
“We can come up with a process that ensures the defendants can get a fair trial in New York,” he said.
Still, others with close personal ties to the case predicted chaos.
“It will be a travesty!” said Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles Burlingame, one of the pilots of the airliners hijacked on Sept. 11.
She said Mohammed’s court appearances will be a “three-ring circus,” with the defendant using every opportunity to spout anti-American views as he did in front of 9/11 family members who traveled to Guantanamo to face him in court.
“He’s going to be exulting in the suffering of the families,” she said. “He will ridicule the judge. He will ridicule his lawyers. He will rally his jihadi brothers all over the world to kill more Americans.”
She said she was sickened by “the prospect of these barbarians being turned into victims by their attorneys.”
New York Rep. Peter King, a Republican who favors trials before a military tribunal, said that providing security for the Mohammed case would further stretch the Police Department’s resources. “They already have 1,000 cops working on counterterrorism,” he said.
King, who previously complained to the attorney general that transferring Guantanamo detainees to New York for a trial “will make New York City that much more of a target,” said he hadn’t changed his mind about the risk.
As for Mohammed, the congressman warned: “I think this is the moment he’s been waiting for.”
