Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Trying hard not to make comparisons to certain countries who are synonymous with terrorism

Excerpts from a sad story and an equally sad comment.

Raw Story (via a Tiny Revolution):
According to human rights lawyer John Sifton, the CIA tortured some of its detainees in the War on Terror so severely that it had to take measures to keep them alive so they could continue being tortured.

Sifton, who the executive director of One World Research, told an interviewer for Russia Today that there was both a CIA detention program and a military detention program and that "The CIA program was by far the most secretive. ... That's the one that only had a few dozen detainees at any given time -- but it's the one that saw the biggest abuses, the most serious forms of torture."

[. . .]

Last year, when Scott Horton interviewed Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, about the CIA program, he asked, "One of the lingering mysteries in Washington has been what happened to the CIA internal probe into homicides involving the program. You note that CIA Inspector General (IG) John Helgerson undertook a study and initially concluded, just as the Red Cross and most legal authorities in the United States and around the world, that the program was illegal and raised serious war crimes issues. Helgerson was summoned repeatedly to meet privately with Vice President Cheney, the man who provided the impetus for the program, and it appears as a result of these meetings the IG’s report was simply shut down."

"Helgerson’s 2004 report had been described to me as very disturbing," Mayer replied, "the size of two Manhattan phone books, and full of terrible descriptions of mistreatment. ... We know that in addition, the IG investigated several alleged homicides involving CIA detainees, and that Helgerson’s office forwarded several to the Justice Department for further consideration and potential prosecution. ... Why have there been no charges filed? It’s a question to which one would expect that Congress and the public would like some answers."

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comment #8:

miggy

I believe that the USA stands at the edge of rare moment of ‘decision liability’.
If they make the wrong decisions they will be responsible for their own destruction and most likely at their own hands.

That the USA has engaged in the very same war crimes that they held others responsible for just 60 years ago, and now avoids responsibility for the same is not lost on the world.

The USA is not in any position to dictate to the world any longer. They have become weak and ineffective in all of their foreign policy, cannot win the wars that they start, cannot pay their debts for those wars, deliver death and destruction to the innocent where ever they go, and live the lies and deception that they themselves call others to responsibility for. They refuse to keep their treaties while holding others to theirs. They lie, cheat and steal with little or no remorse.

Their political system is controlled and owned by the Plutocratic Oligarchy with huge payments being made this very moment to the very people who created the problems in the first place; while thousands are loosing their homes after loosing their jobs, after loosing their liberties at the hands of the previous administrations criminals.

How much longer the world is willing to tolerate the USA is only a matter of time.

The USA could become a world leader overnight with the changes needed to become a leader by example. Whether they have the will, or the strength or the integrity; may remain an unanswered question without action–immediately.

“If the USA were another nation the USA would invade the USA to keep the world safe; and they would be justified.”

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Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Study: Bush administration blocked efforts to prevent housing crisis

Yeah, I remember reading about this last year...

Raw Story:
By Daniel Tencer
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 -- 10:42 am

Federal regulators in the Bush administration blocked attempts by state governments to prevent predatory lending practices that resulted in the financial crisis now stalking the American economy, a new study from the University of North Carolina says.

In 2004, the Office of the Currency Comptroller, an obscure regulatory agency tasked with ensuring the fiscal soundness of America's banks, invoked an 1863 law to give itself the power to override state laws against predatory lending. The OCC told states they could not enforce predatory-lending laws, and all banks would be subject only to less-strict federal laws.

Now, a research paper (PDF) from UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for Community Capital shows that those anti-predatory lending laws had actually worked. States that had stricter regulations on issuing mortgages were found to have fewer foreclosures.

"We believe that these findings are remarkable, since they suggest an important and yet unexplored link between [anti-predatory lending laws] and foreclosures," the study's authors state.

The study may be the first scientific evidence to back up claims made by many critics that the Bush administration and earlier administrations allowed last year's financial crisis to happen by not enforcing common-sense regulations on lenders.

Last year, seven months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing government banking bailout, then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wrote a Washington Post column in which he described how the Bush administration blocked states' efforts to prevent a crisis in the mortgage industry.

Spitzer wrote:

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

Spitzer's Post column ran a month before the New York Times reported that federal authorities were investigating Spitzer as a patron of high-end hookers, ending his political career and long-running crusade against corporate malfeasance. Some observers, including investigative reporter Greg Palast, say this was not a coincidence.

The UNC study "is a perfect reminder, as Congress and the administration tackle financial regulatory reform, that not all regulations are onerous, anti-business, and aimed at choking off financial innovation," writes Mary Kane at the Washington Independent. "And it’s more evidence that borrowers buying beyond their means weren’t the only only players in the sub-prime mess."

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