The Political Whore

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By Manny Leto
PoHo contributor and editor, Cigar City Magazine

You may not have even known it was happening, but “Rapprochement With Cuba: Good For Tampa Bay, Good For Florida, Good For America,” a conference sponsored by the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation and held Saturday at the Italian Club in Ybor City, was, by its very existence, a milestone in repairing the tattered relationship between Tampa and Cuba.

About 150 guests, panelists, professors and local politicians filled the grand, neo-classical Italian Club, once the social, cultural and political epicenter of Tampa’s Italian community. Whether the speeches, panel discussions, and networking sessions will really accomplish much toward ending the 50-year-old U.S. embargo, no one is really sure. However, to get a sense of where the Cuba barometer is pointing, you could start with the venue itself.

In 1955, a young, verbose Fidel Castro arrived in Ybor City. This was no accident, no anomaly. In fact, it made perfect sense. Castro, in a bid to gain popular support for his uprising against CIA-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, he followed — literally — in the footsteps of an earlier young, charismatic Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti. Read the rest of this entry »

It may have been the worst news conference performance by a sitting Speaker of the House ever. Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi harmed her own cause and ratcheted up the torture debate in a newser in which she parsed her knowledge of CIA waterboarding briefings and accused the spy agency of lying to Congress.

Even Florida’s former Sen. Bob Graham (and his infamous lil’ notebooks) has leapt to her side, telling HuffPo that he, too, was lied to by the CIA about torture tactics and use. From that interview:

“When this issue started to resurface I called the appropriate people in the agency and said I would like to know the dates from your records that briefings were held,” Graham recalled. “And they contacted me and gave me four dates — two in April ‘02 and two in September ‘02. Now, one of the things I do, and for which I have taken some flack, is keep a spiral notebook of what I do throughout the day. And so I went through my records and through a combination of my daily schedule, which I keep, and my notebooks, I confirmed and the CIA agreed that my notes were accurate; that three of those four dates there had been no briefing. There was only one day that I had been briefed, which was September the 27th of 2002.”

Video of the full Pelosi news conference after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

A criminal prosecutor is wrapping up his probe of the Bush administration’s handling of evidence that could reveal torture tactics in its terror interrogations.

Documents released this week show that 92 such videotapes were destroyed, much higher than the two tapes that were previously known to have been destroyed.

The AP reports:

The acknowledgment of dozens of destroyed tapes came in a letter filed by government lawyers in New York, where the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking more details of terror interrogation programs.

“The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed,” said the letter by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. “Ninety two videotapes were destroyed.”

The tapes became a contentious issue in the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.

It is not on the newspaper’s website yet, or anywhere else in the blogosphere, but the New York Times’ e-mail alerts says it is so:

From: “NYTimes.com News Alert” <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Reply-To: <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 14:36:19 -0500
Subject: News Alert: Leon E. Panetta to Be Named C.I.A. Director

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Monday, January 5, 2009 — 2:32 PM ET
—–

Leon E. Panetta to Be Named C.I.A. Director

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta,
the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to
take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization
that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using
interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic
officials said Monday.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

UPDATE: NBC News and other outlets are now reporting the same.