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Thanks

Peace

NotSilent

>>>>>>>>>>

Before anything else, we owe a couple dozen of you a bit of an
apology. We underestimated the demand for the new "Single Payer
Health Care" caps and got caught short by a couple dozen with the
shipment that went out yesterday. But we will be taking delivery on
another big batch before the end of the coming week, and they are all
going out first class, so if you don't get yours this week, you will
shortly after that, and we thank you for your patience. And if you
get a request in this week it will go out then as well. In the
meantime, all the "Convict Dick & W" caps have gone out.

Not Even Obama Will Give Up The Illegal War Powers Seized By Bush
Unless Congress Makes Him Do It

Even in appointing a special counsel last week to look into torture,
Eric Holder essentially directed him to IGNORE whether a crime was
committed in ordering torture in the first place. The only mandate
lifelong Republican prosecutor John Durham has been given is about
whether department personnel EXCEEDED the instructions they were
given. The "just following orders defense" rejected at Nuremberg has
been resurrected by our new Attorney General.

With Holder doing such a weak job of enforcing the law on his own, it
is all the more important to get Congress to reassert itself in all
these matters, in particular the abuse of war powers under which all
the torture happened in the first place. And HR 104, To establish a
national commission on presidential war powers and civil liberties,
appears to be a good step in this direction. We should not
preemptively exclude congressional commissions or investigations as a
route to real justice, for that is what Watergate was all about.
Congress must act NOW to constrain ALL future presidents, including
Obama, lest we end up with worse than Bush before we know it.

Presidential War Powers Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1001.php

How all those Nazi war criminals would have wished for a standard
like that set by Eric Holder. Legal opinions no matter how corruptly
or self-servingly drafted become get out of prison free cards. Never
might that there were many valiant, patriotic people in the CIA and
the FBI, the vast majority, who STRENUOUSLY objected to the adoption
of torture as accepted U.S. policy. The fact is that NO member of any
one of these agencies could have believed in good faith that the
torture techniques condemned when used by every other totalitarian
regime were suddenly squeaky clean in their hands.

That is what is so disingenuous about Holder's posture, a refusal to
actually confront the real issue. Either we are a nation of laws or
else we are not. And if the Justice Department was issuing opinions
that were patently bogus in defense of torture, it is corruption in
HIS OWN department that must be rooted out, and all involved in such
outrages must be held fully responsible.

Instead, Holder's suggestion is essentially that a couple so-called
"bad apples" should be scapegoated, just as the contractors directing
the torture at Abu Grahib, under orders that came direct from the
White House, were allowed to skate away, while the lowest level
grunts were given 10 years of hard time. At this point, the best way
to pressure Holder to actually do his job is to pressure Congress to
do theirs, and execute their own investigation into the abuse of war
powers.

Presidential War Powers Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1001.php

And yes, we will continue to hear lies about how splendidly well
torture worked, even though it did not, to try to seduce the American
people into endorsing the abominable. Cheney was all over the TV over
the last couple months asserting that the recently released CIA
report would absolve him, by showing how torture led to all kinds of
great intelligence breakthroughs. There was nothing like that in
there. Instead, there were detailed specific instructions on
executing torture, adopted from and imitating the worst dictatorships
in history, in clinical detail like something out of World War II
Nazi bureaucracy.

The Washington Post is in up to their hips with this disinformation
campaign, running a story over the weekend with a headline suggesting
that waterboarding and sleep deprivation were a boon to intelligence.
And yet when you actually read it you find that WHILE Khalid Sheik
Mohammed was being waterboarded 183 times he was giving false
intelligence that was harmfully counterproductive. It is only AFTER
the criminal mistreatment stopped, and much later, that he actually
started to cooperate.

So let us make no mistake, the people who did these things in our
name were a handful of true sickos, getting in their own sadistic
jollies to the disgrace of the good name of the United States of
America. And not just those few who willingly went along with it
without objection, those who authorized, justified it, and ordered it
must also be held responsible, right back to the desk of former Vice
President Dick Cheney, and his go along patsy, George Bush. If Holder
is so anxious to relieve CIA employees of responsibility, let them
testify against the real criminal kingpins in the White House, as the
price of their immunity.

So again, if want a "Convict Dick & W" cap we'll be shipping more of
those this week, we'll have more of the "Single Payer Health Care"
caps at the same time. And you can request either of these or any
other of our progressive advocacy gifts from the return page of the
action page above, or directly from this link.

Progressive Advocacy Gifts: http://www.peaceteam.net/all_gifts.php

And yes, you can also respond to this action through the new Twitter
gateway. Just send the following Twitter reply, and add any personal
comment you like.

@cxs #p1001

And if you want a step by step explanation of how to set up the
Twitter thing here is the link for that.

Twitter Activism Step-By-Step: http://tcxs.net/step_by_step.php

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm

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