The Only Way to Commemorate 9/11

Reading the whole painful, devastating thing is the most patriotic thing you will ever do in your life, just after voting and just before military service.

Charlie Pierce:

Getting someone to talk on the record is the eternal jackpot of investigative reporting, and, in today's Guardian, Ackerman hits the Comstock Lode with Daniel Jones, who was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee when that committee was looking into the practice of rendition and torture and the other extraconstitutional horrors perpetrated in our name by the late Avignon Presidency, and who also looked on in anger as the CIA worked overtime to ratfck the investigation and to bury its result. This is the first of a three-part series. I'd say that the extended weekend forecast calls for fury and outrage.

It begins with a holy-shit moment straight out of a paranoid political thriller, except that it was real, and it happened here. From The Guardian:

There was one document in particular that proved it. Jones and his team had found it years before, placed mysteriously onto a shared computer network drive the Senate intelligence committee investigators were using in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. But they hadn't appreciated its full significance until the agency, in an attempt at refuting a report that was still far from publication, told Barack Obama's staff that the committee was pushing a hysterical interpretation of the agency's fateful post-9/11 embrace of torture. The document, prepared for Leon Panetta when he was CIA director, had reached the same conclusions about the torture program that Jones had. As long as Jones had it, he would be able to show that the agency knew full well how brutal the torture was; how ineffective its torturers considered it to be; and how thoroughly the CIA had covered all of that up. As long as Jones had the document, that is. Lurking in the back of his mind was the event that had led him to devote five years of ceaseless work, through nights and weekends: the CIA had already destroyed evidence of torture. It did that before the Senate had launched an investigation, and long before that investigation had turned acrimonious. Inside the small room in Virginia the CIA had set up for the Senate investigators, Jones reached for his canvas messenger bag. He slipped crucial printed-out passages of what he called the Panetta Review into the bag and secured its lock. Sometime after 1am, Jones walked out, carrying his bag as he always did, and neglecting to tell the agency security personnel what it contained. After years of working together, no one asked him to open the bag.

And thus was saved a document that gave the lie to everything the CIA ever said in public about how it squandered the moral authority of the United States in the world. It is important to note, as Ackerman does, that Jones didn't remove this document to leak it—no Ellsberg, he—but to make sure that the cover-up artists from Langley didn't burn the thing.

Yet Another Coverup of a Murdered Soldier in the "War on Terra"

If you liked the Pat Tillman case, you'll love this one.

The Angry Independent, guest-posting on The Rude Pundit (no permlink - scroll down to America's Forgotten Soldier) details the horrific case of Private Lavena Lynn Johnson.

Young Pvt. Lavena Johnson, was killed in Iraq on July 19th, 2005. Evidence in the case points to assault and murder. However, the Army has been covering up the killing, calling the soldiers death a suicide instead. The Army has refused to provide the family with key documents, and has ignored the families attempts to find answers in their daughters death.

(SNIP)

My theory on what may have happened to this young soldier? She was likely a victim of a rape or sexual assault of some kind, likely by superior officers or enlisted soldiers. In an effort to cover up their crime and keep her from telling anyone, they decided to kill her. The evidence in the case shows that the suspect (s) attempted to destroy evidence at the crime scene, including an attempt to try to set the crime scene on fire. The new information also shows that there was a blood trail leading outside from Lavena's tent. If she shot herself in the head with an M-16, then she would not have been able to get up and walk outside of her tent to create the blood trail. Another person would have had to do that.

OR an alternate scenario could be that Lavena was a witness to or knew of serious criminal activity involving officers or senior enlisted folks over there. She must have saw something or heard something, and her superiors knew that she could be a witness against them. In an effort to guarantee that she would not tell what she knew, someone decided to have her killed.

____________________________

Fast Forward to May of 2007

Lavena Johnsons body was exhumed and an independent autopsy was performed. The final report is still pending. The Army is still stonewalling the family and Congress regarding documents and other evidence in the case.

This is currently where the case stands.

The publics help is still needed to get this story on the national stage. Once in the spotlight, pressure could be brought to bare to force officials into action.

Please call or write your member of Congress. If you are a journalist or the editor of a newspaper or magazine, you could help by covering the story and getting the word out.

Incredibly depressing post-script: Need I mention that unlike non-hero Jessica Lynch, Pvt. Johnson is neither white nor blond?