Just sayin' - offered without comment. And btw (to forestall some of the usual screeds):
-I am no troll
-voted straight Dem since Mcgoven (including Gore Kerry Obama)
-still a Democrat
1. A memo obtained by the Huffington Post confirms that the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby secretly agreed to precisely the sort of wide-ranging deal that both parties have been denying over the past week.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/13/internal-memo-confirms-bi_n_258285.html2. If his first publicly known rendition case is any indication, there may well be a legitimate question as to whether Obama's rendition program is even more repulsive than that of George Bush.
http://firedoglake.com/ AND
Uhm, rendition and torture for fraud?
Now in a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like.
Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.
According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company's U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/