Peter Pace Out

Don’t let the door hit you in your homophobic ass. Thank god for Robert Gates not recommending Pace for another confirmation.

Washington Post:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced today that Marine Gen. Peter W. Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will step down at the end of his two-year term in September, a decision Gates said he made to avoid possibly contentious re-nomination hearings before the Democratically-controlled Congress.

The surprise announcement means Pace will be removed from the nation’s top military post after just two years as chairman, the shortest tenure for a general officer since 1964. Virtually all of the 16 chairmen since 1949 have served at least four years.

Gates said he has recommended that President Bush nominate Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chief of naval operations, as the next chairman of the joint chiefs for the term that begins Oct. 1. Mullen is the longest serving of the service branch chiefs of staff.

Gates said that political considerations were at the root of his decision. He said he spoke to leaders on Capitol Hill and was warned that re-nomination hearings likely would focus on the Iraq war and would be a “very contentious process.”

Full story

Secret CIA Jails Hosted By Poland, Romania

Of course Bush and the gang will say this is pure BS. As we know every think that is true is a lie to Bush.

PARIS (Reuters) – A European investigator says he has proof Poland and Romania hosted secret CIA prisons under a post-9/11 pact to hunt down and interrogate “high value” terrorist suspects wanted by the United States.

Swiss senator Dick Marty said Poland housed some of the CIA’s most sensitive prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who says he masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States that killed almost 3,000 people.

“There is now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003-2005, in particular in Poland and Romania,” Marty says in a report for the Council of Europe human rights watchdog.

Bush should be going on trial for this also.

According to the report, Poland’s then-president Aleksander Kwasniewski, head of National Security Bureau Marek Siwiec, Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski and head of military intelligence Marek Dukaczewski were aware of and could be held accountable for the operation of CIA secret prisons in Poland.

The facilities were “run directly and exclusively by the CIA” and European governments connived with the secret transfers and detentions, known as extraordinary renditions, Marty said.

President George W. Bush confirmed last September the CIA had run secret detention centers abroad where terrorism suspects had been interrogated, but he named no country.

The CIA continues to lie for Bush and his criminal behavior.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said he had not yet seen the report. “Europe has been the source of grossly inaccurate allegations about the CIA and counter-terrorism,” he said. “And people should remember that Europeans have benefited from the agency’s bold, lawful work to disrupt terrorist plots.”

The report said U.S. intelligence contacts and other sources confirmed Poland and Romania “did host secret detention centers under a special CIA program established by the American administration in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 to ‘kill, capture and detain’ terrorist suspects deemed of ‘high value’”.

Wait didn’t Bush and Paul Gimigliano say that we don’t torture? Yeah right.

Interrogation techniques used on suspects were “tantamount to torture” said the report. Marty told the Le Figaro daily that Washington had waged a war against terrorism without rules, handing suspects to “rogue states like Syria” to avoid the constraints of U.S. law.

As Marty’s report was issued, 26 Americans, almost all of them suspected CIA agents, went in trial in absentia in Italy, accused of kidnapping a Muslim man in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt as part of Washington’s extraordinary rendition policy.