Did Sarah Palin commit perjury during her testimony in the David Kernell trial?

By GottaLaff

Sarah Palin outside court house in Knoxville

I get emails from time to time from our pals over at Palingates, inviting me to read about their latest discoveries. They do a great job of digging up evidence that calls into question the many versions of events that Barbie McLipSchmutz passes along to the accommodating media.

They also uncover emails galore, long lost press accounts, statements, videos, you name it.

Their most recent investigation involves the email hacking trial of David Kernell at which Barbie gave testimony:

Did Sarah Palin commit perjury while giving her testimony in Knoxville? We have to put this as a question, because we don't know the exact wording of all she said and have to rely on news reports for our information.

However, there are strong indications that Palin purposely lied during her testimony.

Palingates then goes on to reveal the contents of several emails as well as conflicting quotes regarding Todd, Trig, and Bristol, and much more.

Summary:

If we look at Sarah's statements from an objective point of view, provided that the reporting in the news was correct, I strongly believe that many prosecutors would choose "GUILTY". However, this is Sarah Palin we are talking about, the woman who gets away with virtually anything. For how long still? Only God knows!

However, we won't forget Sarah's immortal words:

"I do think there should be consequences for bad behavior."

Please read all about it here.

Army Major General Taguba Saw Video of Male Soldier Sodomizing Female Detainee

By GottaLaff

UPDATE: Taguba denies he's seen abuse photos suppressed by Obama
But what about video?

Original post:

Again, this is becoming a hotter and hotter topic, as I knew it would be when I posted about some unreleased photos the other day. Also, a post about some others/same (?) here. More of my follow-up posts here and here. It's getting confusing, is it not?

Now, some clarification via Jason Leopold:

In 2007, shortly after he was forced into retirement, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, made a startling admission. During the course of his investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Taguba said he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.”

Taguba told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that he saw other graphic photos and videos as well, including one depicting the “sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees.”

That video as well as photographs Taguba saw of U.S. soldiers raping and torturing Iraqi prisoners, remains in the possession of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID).

Taguba said he did not discuss the details of the more graphic photographs and videos he saw in his voluminous report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib because of the Army’s ongoing criminal probe and the photographs’ “extremely sensitive nature.”

Taguba's report on the widespread of abuse of prisoners did say that he found credible a report that a soldier had sodomized “a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.” [...]

But the photographs described by the Telegraph are not the ones that were at the center of the five-year-old lawsuit between the Bush administration and the ACLU that Obama had agreed earlier this year to release.

Two weeks ago, after Obama decided against releasing the photographs, the Telegraph published a story along with several pictures depicting Iraqi prisoners being abused claiming those too were the ones Obama was withholding. But that report was also incorrect as the photographs the Telegraph published had first surfaced in 2006. The newspaper has since changed the headline and first paragraph of its report.

The photographs Obama has decided to withhold, as I first reported May 15, are ones that were taken in 2003 and 2004 in which U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan took dozens of pictures of their colleagues pointing assault rifles and pistols at the heads and backs of hooded and bound detainees.

Another photograph, found on a government computer, showed two male soldiers and one female soldier pointing a broom to one detainee “as if I was sticking the end of a broom stick into [his] rectum,” according to the female soldier’s account as told to an Army criminal investigator.

I found the documents that describes many of the photographs that were set for release this month on the ACLU’s website. [...] Those files can be downloaded here: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5].

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, confirmed that the photographs described in documents posted on the group's website were those that President Obama has decided to withhold fearing the disclosure would stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.

That does not mean the photographs and videos described by Taguba do not exist, as Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs seemed to suggest in response to the Telegraph’s report Thursday, which was also harshly critical of the British press in general. It's just not the photographs in question.

Leopold has more details here.

H/t: The Joshua Blog

Arkansas, 5 Other States, Ban Atheists from Public Service. Seriously

By GottaLaff

How troglodytic of them:

Can it be constitutional to exclude from public service or service as a witness in a state court any and all atheists? [...] I was flabbergasted to find that Arkansas is one of a half-dozen states that does so. Read on and be flabbergasted (or not) yourself. But know in advance that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled illegal all such laws in 1961:

Hard to say what was more remarkable about the resolution that was read into the record and referred to committee Wednesday by a member of the 87th Arkansas General Assembly.

The resolution itself: HJR 1009: AMENDING THE ARKANSAS CONSTITUTION TO REPEAL THE PROHIBITION AGAINST AN ATHEIST HOLDING ANY OFFICE IN THE CIVIL DEPARTMENTS OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS OR TESTIFYING AS A WITNESS IN ANY COURT.

Or the fact that it was submitted by the Green Party's highest-ranking elected official in America, state Rep. Richard Carroll of North Little Rock, who was elected in November winning more than 80 percent of the vote in his district.

Arkansas is one of half a dozen states that still exclude non-believers from public office. Article 19 Section 1 of the 1874 Arkansas Constitution states that "No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.

I guess I won't be holding public office or swearing in to a court of law in Arkansas any time soon. Does it count that I was raised Jewish? Good lord. What am I even thinking? That's a big ol' double whammy. With my background, they probably wouldn't even let me into the state.

Paging Attorney General Holder: Former Gitmo Guard Tells All, and It's Not Pretty

By GottaLaff

It seems like a daily occurrence now: Someone comes forward to share his or her vile revelations about the Bush Crime Family's practice of repeatedly using torture, and then covering it up:

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed.

But we should look forward, not back, according to Team Obama. I'm a big fan, Prez O, but I'm a bigger fan of justice and the Constitution. My hope is that the president is waiting for things like this to turn up so that he can say that, clearly, he would be justified in nailing these thugs.

Neely:

• [The guards ] were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned.

• [There were] displays of contempt for Islam by the camp authorities, and also specific documentation of mistreatment of the Qu’ran. [...] Moreover, it is clear that the Pentagon Public Affairs office was fully aware, even as it went on the attack against Newsweek, that its claims were false and the weekly’s reporting was accurate.

• [H]ealth professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. [...] The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

And in case all of that isn't obvious enough, here is the reason we need to conduct a full and thorough investigation... right here:

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

You can find his entire account here.

Mumbai witness: "He wore a smile on his face"

By GottaLaff

(AFP/Indranil Mukherjee)

CNN's Wolf Blitzer is interviewing a survivor of the Taj Mahal Hotel attack:

"He wore a smile on his face as he sprayed the bullets."
--Sajjad Karim, a British member of the European Parliament, witness to Mumbai attack.

Stevens witness says he was coached by prosecutors

By GottaLaff

Here comes more drama:

In a new twist in a case that has seen no shortage of unusual events, a key prosecution witness in the trial of Sen. Ted Stevens has written a letter to the judge saying that some of his testimony wasn't true and that he was coached in his answers by prosecutors.

David Anderson, a nephew and once-trusted employee of Veco chief executive Bill Allen, also said the government lied in a letter to Stevens' defense attorneys that described as false an affidavit signed by Anderson in March.

Details here.