Publishing the Iraq War II Sodomy and Abuse photos are for DCF training purposes.

[Mort Zuckerman]

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Subject: Publishing the Iraq War II Sodomy and Abuse photos are for
DCF training purposes.

Date: Jun 1, 2009 12:22 PM

Silly people.

I'm leaving them up on my homepage because I
thought maybe DCF could use them in their
foster-care training program, to add to the
penis-biting and penis-pinching and other child
beatings so well protected and promoted
by DCF:
http://www.actionlyme.org/index.htm

More:
http://www.actionlyme.org/andersonpenisbiter.htm

Think of it as desensitizing parents as to what
to expect will happen to their kidnapped children
in DCF's "care," in addition to the outright
head-bashing and the choking-to-death, and the
chest-crushing and the brain damage from the
psychotropics:
http://www.actionlyme.org/DCF_GRADUATARDS_SPEAK.htm
http://www.actionlyme.org/BRAINDAMAGE.htm

:)))

I even called them (DCF) and recommended they review
the positions for instructing in DCF slut school!!
http://www.actionlyme.org/RAGAGLIA_GRANDJURY_DETAILS.htm

Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
==========================================

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/01-9
Published on Monday, June 1, 2009 by Salon.com
Obama's Support for the New Graham-Lieberman Secrecy Law

by Glenn Greenwald

It was one thing when President Obama reversed himself last month by
announcing that he would appeal the Second Circuit's ruling that the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compelled disclosure of various
photographs of detainee abuse sought by the ACLU. Agree or disagree
with Obama's decision, at least the basic legal framework of
transparency was being respected, since Obama's actions amounted to
nothing more than a request that the Supreme Court review whether the
mandates of FOIA actually required disclosure in this case. But now
-- obviously anticipating that the Government is likely to lose in
court again (.pdf) -- Obama wants Congress to change FOIA by
retroactively narrowing its disclosure requirements, prevent a legal
ruling by the courts, and vest himself with brand new secrecy powers
under the law which, just as a factual matter, not even George Bush
sought for himself.

The White House is actively supporting a new bill jointly sponsored by
Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman -- called The Detainee
Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 -- that literally has no
purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any "photograph
taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the
treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after
September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in
operations outside of the United States." As long as the Defense
Secretary certifies -- with no review possible -- that disclosure
would "endanger" American citizens or our troops, then the photographs
can be suppressed even if FOIA requires disclosure. The certification
lasts 3 years and can be renewed indefinitely. The Senate passed the
bill as an amendment last week.

Just imagine if any other country did this. Imagine if a foreign
government were accused of systematically torturing and otherwise
brutally abusing detainees in its custody for years, and there was
ample photographic evidence proving the extent and brutality of the
abuse. Further imagine that the country's judiciary -- applying
decades-old transparency laws -- ruled that the government was legally
required to make that evidence public. But in response, that
country's President demanded that those transparency laws be
retroactively changed for no reason other than to explicitly empower
him to keep the photographic evidence suppressed, and a compliant
Congress then immediately passed a new law empowering the President to
suppress that evidence. What kind of a country passes a law that has
no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of
the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it
doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the
President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

That this exact scenario is now happening in the U.S. is all the more
remarkable given that the President who is demanding these new
suppression powers is the same one who repeatedly vowed "to make his
administration the most open and transparent in history." After
noting the tentative steps Obama has taken to increase transparency,
the generally pro-Obama Washington Post Editorial Page today observed:
"what makes the administration's support for the photographic records
act so regrettable" is that "Mr. Obama runs the risk of taking two
steps back in his quest for more open government."

What makes all of this even worse is that it is part of a broader
trend whereby the Government simply retroactively changes the law
whenever it decides it does not want to abide by it. For decades, we
had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication
carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their
communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that
the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law
retroactively so that it no longer applied. For decades, we had laws
imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who
engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our
government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law
to protect the torturers. And now that courts have ruled that our
decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture
evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law
-- again -- this time to empower the President to suppress that
evidence anyway.

Other than creating an illusion of transparency and accountability,
what's the point of having laws that purport to restrict what the
Government can do if political officials just retroactively waive
those laws whenever they want? What's the point of having a FOIA law
if the Government will simply pass a new law exempting itself from
FOIA's mandates any time it loses in court and wants to conceal
evidence anyway? And what conceivable rationale is there for
limiting the President's new secrecy powers to post-9/11 photographs?
Given that anything which reflects poorly on our Government can be
said to endanger our troops and American citizens, why stop here? Why
not just have a general power of suppression whereby the President can
keep any evidence secret as long as his Defense Secretary decrees that
its disclosure will "endanger" the troops?

The debate over whether there is value in disclosing these specific
photographs is entirely misplaced. That isn't how open government
works. The burden isn't on citizens to prove that there is value in
disclosure. Everything that government does is supposed to be
transparent to the public unless there is a compelling reason for
secrecy -- and the whole point of FOIA always has been that mere
embarrassment, the mere fact that information reflects poorly on our
government, isn't a legitimate ground for concealment. That's a
critical principle for open government. This new law explicitly guts
that principle. It institutionalizes the pernicious notion that
secrecy is justified where disclosure would reflect badly on the
Government and thus "endanger" American citizens and/or our troops.

Combine all of this with the increasingly disturbing spectacle taking
place in a California federal court in the Al-Haramain case -- where
the Obama DOJ is on the verge of being sanctioned by a federal judge
for defying the court's order to make available documents relating to
Bush's illegal eavesdropping activities -- and the infatuation with
excessive presidential secrecy, the linchpin of government abuse,
appears alive and well in the new administration. Is there really
anyone who wants to argue that defiance of a federal court's order and
enacting a new law authorizing suppression of torture evidence -- the
disclosure of which is compelled both by courts and FOIA -- are
remotely consistent with anything Obama said he would do, or remotely
consistent with what a healthy democratic government would do?
© 2009 Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights
litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times
Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush
administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His
second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.


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