It’s the morning after Independence Day, and Eric Holder Jr. is feeling the weight of history. The night before, he’d stood on the roof of the White House alongside the president of the United States, leaning over a railing to watch fireworks burst over the Mall, the monuments to Lincoln and Washington aglow at either end. “I was so struck by the fact that for the first time in history an African-American was presiding over this celebration of what our nation is all about,” he says. Now, sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and a gray polo shirt, as his 11-year-old son, Buddy, dashes in and out of the room, Holder is reflecting on his own role. He doesn’t dwell on the fact that he’s the country’s first black attorney general. He is focused instead on the tension that the best of his predecessors have confronted: how does one faithfully serve both the law and the president?
Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. “You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation’s laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort,” Holder says. “But the reality of being A.G. is that I’m also part of the president’s team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values.”
These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. “I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda,” he says. “But that can’t be a part of my decision.”
The action that we see in this video required temperatures of around 3000 degree F. At the same time this was happening WTC6 became a burned out hulk with evidence of extremely high temperatures. Cars and trucks on the surrounding streets were photographed and seen by witnesses as they melted and burst into flames, some of them up to six blocks away. WTC6 held an arsenal of guns, some of which were found in the debris. Some of them are now in the NYPD Museum on exhibit with concrete and steel melted together. It requires around 3000 degrees F. for this to happen.
Part of this video is in slo-mo which gives plenty of time to see falling debris turn to dust before it gets to the ground.
I can’t explain the extreme temperatures nor the massive energy release that we see here, but it sure looks like a new investigation is needed with all of the evidence on the table.
The Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner First Posted: 07- 9-09 11:53 AM | Updated: 07- 9-09 05:10 PM
Yesterday evening, Greg Sargent reported on The Plum Line that one of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s key reasons for resigning — that ethics complaints against her were draining the state of money — appeared to be false.
In response to our questions, the Governor’s office provided us with a detailed breakdown of the millions Palin has claimed has gone to defending against ethics complaints. It does list roughly $1.9 million in expenditures.
But Murrow, the spokesperson, acknowledged to our reporter, Amanda Erickson, that this total was arrived at by adding up attorney hours spent on fending off complaints — based on the fixed salaries of lawyers in the governor’s office and the Department of Law. The money would have gone to the lawyers no matter what they were doing. The complaints are “just distracting them from other duties,” Murrow said.
In other words, while these lawyers might have been free to do other legal work for the state, the ethics complaints have apparently not had the real world impact Palin has claimed, and didn’t drain money away from cops, teachers, roads and other things.
The Anchorage Daily News did a thorough analysis and backed up the spokesperson. The ethics complaints took up time that staff could have spent doing other work, but they did not cost Alaska any money.
“Is it a check that we wrote, no, but is it staff hours, yes,” Sharon Leighow, spokeswoman for Palin, said of the expenses related to state employee work.
Those state employees would have been paid regardless.
A large chunk of that work went into the state personnel board’s “Troopergate” investigation, which Palin herself initiated on the grounds that a legislative probe was politicized. Only three of the ethics complaints are still pending, a fact that makes Palin’s explanation seem even less sensible.
A Government Accountability Office investigator smuggled live bomb components into a federal building in just 27 seconds, then assembled a bomb in a restroom and ventured throughout the building without being detected, a leaked tape revealed Wednesday.
In addition, congressional investigators were able to penetrate every single federal building they probed without any difficulty — 10 in all.
Gareth Porter | Raw Story | Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Official government documents reveal new side of defense secretary’s legacy
Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967, took many secrets with him when he died Monday at 93. But probably no secret was more sensitive politically than the one that would have changed fundamentally the public perception of his role in Vietnam policy had it been become widely known.
The secret was his deliberate deceit of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 4, 1964 regarding the alleged attack on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Documents which have been available for decades in the LBJ Library show clearly that McNamara failed to inform Johnson that the U.S. naval task group commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, had changed his mind about the alleged North Vietnamese torpedo attack on U.S. warships he had reported earlier that day.
By early afternoon Washington time, Herrick had reported to the Commander in Chief Pacific in Honolulu that “freak weather effects” on the ship’s radar had made such an attack questionable. In fact, Herrick was now saying, in a message sent at 1:27 pm Washington time, that no North Vietnamese patrol boats had actually been sighted. Herrick now proposed a “complete evaluation before any further action taken.”
Only Three Palin Ethics Complaints Were Still Pending
TPM Muckraker- By Zachary Roth – July 8, 2009, 3:01PM
If you had to pick out a coherent explanation given by Sarah Palin for her decision to quit as Alaska governor, you’d probably have to settle on the notion that she felt her agenda was being paralyzed by frivolous ethics complaints, and that she only foresaw additional ones. So she stepped down so as not to continue to drag Alaskans through the process.
“Palin Says Ethics Complaints Were Paralyzing” reported the Anchorage Daily News after the governor’s round of beachside interviews Monday. And Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, who’ll soon replace Palin as governor, had given that line over the weekend, saying on Fox News that Palin had talked to him about the toll the complaints had taken.
Obviously, the ethics complaint excuse doesn’t make sense for a lot of reasons. Still, it’s worth taking a close look at the list of 18 complaints filed against Palin during her tenure as governor, as compiled by the ADN.
This past weekend, lost in the wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage and Sarah Palin goodbye-cruel-world nincompoopery, there was a second round of tea party protests.
They were easy to miss because nobody showed up. But if you happened to have been driving in the vicinity of an evil publicly-funded park, you might’ve seen two or three Republicans loitering around — sitting there in the socialized grass, believing that a vigorous protest involves napping in lawn chairs.
While I spent a few moments of my holiday weekend revisiting the irony of anti-socialism protests taking place on socialized park land, it occurred to me that the proposed government-run public health insurance option probably won’t cost nearly as much as the CBO is suggesting.
Because clearly there won’t be any Republicans signing up for it.
I mean, no Republican would dare sign up for inexpensive, easily portable health insurance. Not when red, white and blue All American for-profit health insurance is available. After all, free market private health insurance will probably continue to be the more expensive option, so that must mean it’s the finest insurance, right? Expensive equals good, no? (No. More on that presently.)
Well folks, most of the steel was hauled to China and other places, but there was no way Giuliani could keep all that dust out of the public domain. I wonder how many people kept little vials of it, or for that matter still have some behind their fridge or by the water heater. That old victorean etagere in a New York apartment could even contain some of this evidence, and if this danish scientist is right could be subpoenaed for a real investigation instead of the coverup by the NIST that we have been witnessing for eight years.
Niels Harrit and 8 other scientists found nano-thermite in the dust from the World Trade Center.
Robert S. McNamara, the forceful and cerebral defense secretary who helped lead the nation into the maelstrom of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war’s moral consequences, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 93.
His wife, Diana, said Mr. McNamara died in his sleep at 5:30 a.m., adding that he had been in failing health for some time.
Mr. McNamara was the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century. Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw hundreds of military missions, thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military spending and foreign arms sales. He also enlarged the defense secretary’s role, handling foreign diplomacy and the dispatch of troops to enforce civil rights in the South.
“He’s like a jackhammer,” Johnson said. “No human being can take what he takes. He drives too hard. He is too perfect.”
As early as April 1964, Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon, called Vietnam “McNamara’s War.” Mr. McNamara did not object. “I am pleased to be identified with it,” he said, “and do whatever I can to win it.”
Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.
Anthony: President John F. Kennedy is often accused of starting the Vietnam War. This is untrue. What Kennedy did was to increase the number of American non-combatant military personnel in Vietnam. Hostilities began after President Johnson claimed that two American destroyers were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, by which he gained Congress’s approval for military action. He omitted to mention that the destroyers in question had been spying on North Vietnam and giving information on the positions of military targets to the South Vietnamese. Johnson later said that the blips which the US ships got on their radar and interpreted as enemy boats could have been whales or flying fish. McNamara, in the TV documentary, Fog of War, later admitted, concerning the alleged attack, “It didn’t happen.”
Readers may be interested to read this article, Exit Strategy, by James K. Galbraith, based on White House recordings, in which he shows that in the fall of 1963, on McNamara’s own recommendation, Kennedy did indeed decide to end American involvement in Vietnam. Tragically, Kennedy was assassinated shortly after, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, on the advice of the Wise Men, decided to escalate the war.
What baffles me is that it was on McNamara’s own advice that Kennedy made this decision, but that McNamara nevertheless went along with Johnson’s very different, and disastrous, Vietnam strategy.
He was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion.
He had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the law on secrets.
Following his death, his computers were seized and it is still not known if any rough draft was discovered by investigators and, if so, what happened to the material.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” the revolutionary pamphlet published in January 1776. Ronald Reagan quoted those words on July 17, 1980, when he addressed the Republican National Convention and accepted his party’s presidential nomination. Reagan led a coalition of corporate oligarchs, imperial crusaders and Christian fundamentalists to power, and to this day Reaganism remains the official gospel of the old guard in the Republican Party. The republican and social democratic ideals of Paine are long lost to many modern partisan Republicans and Democrats, but many memorable phrases of Paine still fill the mouths of career politicians.
When the Iraq war, a broken health care system and a plunging economy gave the Democratic Party a political advantage, Barack Obama raised hopes and promised change. When Obama gave his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, he too quoted Paine, this time from the first of 13 articles collected in “The American Crisis”—an article Gen. Washington ordered read to his troops before crossing the Delaware River on Christmas 1776 to fight the Hessian mercenaries of King George III: “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.” Reagan and Obama each lifted some good lines from Paine for their own rhetorical purposes; but each likewise cared more for stagecraft than for the original script.
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Dr David Kelly
NIST report doesn’t explain fusing of concrete & steel
July 10, 2009 by wordgeezer
The action that we see in this video required temperatures of around 3000 degree F. At the same time this was happening WTC6 became a burned out hulk with evidence of extremely high temperatures. Cars and trucks on the surrounding streets were photographed and seen by witnesses as they melted and burst into flames, some of them up to six blocks away. WTC6 held an arsenal of guns, some of which were found in the debris. Some of them are now in the NYPD Museum on exhibit with concrete and steel melted together. It requires around 3000 degrees F. for this to happen.
Part of this video is in slo-mo which gives plenty of time to see falling debris turn to dust before it gets to the ground.
I can’t explain the extreme temperatures nor the massive energy release that we see here, but it sure looks like a new investigation is needed with all of the evidence on the table.
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