You knew it was coming...yup, Republicans really embrace the "rule of law", don't they?

San Diego UnionTrib:

An attorney who admitted leaking the confidential grand jury testimony of Barry Bonds to the media in the BALCO case, asked a federal judge for leniency yesterday in San Francisco, noting that President Bush commuted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence for a similar crime.

In doing so, Troy Ellerman joins a growing a list of defendants across the country who have made the same arguments for leniency since Bush said the former vice presidential aide's 2½ -year sentence for leaking the name of a CIA operative was too harsh and commuted it to probation and a fine.

Ellerman's invocation of Libby's case was part of a much larger court filing arguing for a prison sentence of 15 months, rather than the two years federal prosecutors are seeking.

Via Reuters:

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Friday it would hear appeals by Guantanamo prisoners on their right to challenge their indefinite confinement, a test of President George W. Bush's powers in the war on terrorism.The high court in April had denied the same appeals by the prisoners. In a surprise and highly unusual reversal, the justices said they would hear arguments and decide the two cases during the court's term that starts in October.

At issue is an anti-terrorism law that Bush pushed through Congress last year taking away the right of the foreign terrorist suspects at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to have a judicial review of their detention.

The Supreme Court's decision to hear the cases was a setback for the Bush administration, which had urged the justices to turn down the appeals. Read more...

  Back on April 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified, under oath, that he had not spoken with “witnesses” in the U.S. Attorney scandal about the events surrounding the purge because it would have been inappropriate. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I haven’t talked to witnesses because of the fact that I haven’t wanted to interfere with this investigation and department investigations.”

A month later, Monica Goodling, immunity in hand, testified that Gonzales’ claim wasn’t quite right. She described a meeting in March, shortly before she resigned from the Justice Department, in which Gonzales asked her questions that Goodling said made her “uncomfortable.” She told lawmakers that the AG seemed to be trying to compare recollections, so their stories would be consistent if they were questioned about their actions. She testified, “I just thought maybe we shouldn’t have that conversation.”

For Gonzales, this raised the specter of two new problems, to add to an already long list. On the one hand, he may have committed obstruction of justice. On the other hand, he may have lied under oath about it. As Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) noted at the time, “It’s very clear that the attorney general was not fully accurate in his testimony. It was an inappropriate conversation on the attorney general’s own terms.”

Apparently, the Justice Department’s own inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility agree — they’ve launched an investigation into the Attorney General’s conduct.

Continue reading »

Campaign for America's Future:

One of the biggest of the Bush Big Cons has been the Jose Padilla "dirty bomber" case. Nearly every claim the government originally made about him has been proven an outright lie, as Lewis Koch demonstrated to a fare-thee-well in this classic article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Now that Padilla's finally going on trial - an eventuality the government worked very, very hard to render impossible - the restrictions on reporters are unprecedented. Washington claims security concerns. Almost certainly, what they're really afraid of is embarrasment. If Geoge Orwell and Franz Kafka had a love child, it would look like the Padilla case. God forbid it should be exposed to the light of day.

Lewis Koch will be covering the trial proceedings at FireDogLake. He'll have posts on Wednesday at 6:00 pm Pacific/9:00 pm Eastern and Friday at 4:00 pm Pacific/7:00 pm Eastern and if warranted throughout the week. This is potentially a very big deal that we want to make sure doesn't get buried in the mainstream media, because it exemplifies everything that is wrong with the way the Bush administration is prosecuting the "War on Terror".

Guardian Unlimited (h/t Gregory):

A recent case suggests that the war on terror has been superseded by the war on embarrassment

A man accused of blowing up an airliner and killing 73 people, who has already admitted to bombing hotels with fatal consequences and who has a conviction for a failed assassination attempt on a head of state, was freed on a technicality in a Texas court this week, and can look forward to a quiet retirement in Florida.

In London a man accused of hacking into the computer system of the Pentagon and Nasa is waiting to see if the House of Lords will hear his appeal against extradition to the US to face a trial in which one prosecutor has already indicated he should "fry". Blowing up an airliner is clearly regarded as less serious than causing major embarrassment to the defence establishment.

Verizon is arguing that it can violate Americans' first amendment rights and turn over phone records to the federal government because their first amendment rights permit them to exercise their free speech and do so.

arstechnica.com:

Verizon is one of the phone companies currently being sued over its alleged disclosure of customer phone records to the NSA. In a response to the court last week, the company asked for the entire consolidated case against it to be thrown out—on free speech grounds.

The response also alleges that the case should be thrown out because even looking into the issue could violate state secrets, of course, but a much longer section of the response tries to make the case that Verizon has a First Amendment right to "petition" the government. "Based on plaintiffs' own allegations, defendants' right to communicate such information to the government is fully protected by the Free Speech and Petition Clauses of the First Amendment," argue Verizon's lawyers.

Essentially, the argument is that turning over truthful information to the government is free speech, and the EFF and ACLU can't do anything about it. In fact, Verizon basically argues that the entire lawsuit is a giant SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) suit, and that the case is an attempt to deter the company from exercising its First Amendment right to turn over customer calling information to government security services.

Paging Mr. Orwell. Mr Orwell...

One day after Law Day -- the day when we celebrate being a society that upholds and lives by the rule of law -- the Wall St. Journal runs an op-ed that explicitly argues that the President is greater than the rule of law. Glenn breaks it down:

Salon:

The Wall St. Journal online has today published a lengthy and truly astonishing article by Harvard Government Professor Harvey Mansfield, which expressly argues that the power of the President is greater than "the rule of law."
The article bears this headline: The Case for the Strong Executive -- Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy. And it is the most explicit argument I have seen yet for vesting in the President the power to override and ignore the rule of law in order to recieve the glories of what Mansfield calls "one-man rule." Read more...

I have a friend who was just blocks away from the WTC when the towers fell and her apartment was engulfed in ash for hours and hours. When we finally got in contact again and she shared with me how horrifying the experience had been, I admit that one of the first things I thought about was all that free flying asbestos from the buildings. My friend moved to Los Angeles a year later. But that year of living (and breathing) the air near Ground Zero has resulted in a permanent cough. And now, we get this:

TIME:

An appeals court ruling could spell trouble for New Yorkers suing the Environmental Protection Agency and its former chief for saying that sooty Lower Manhattan air was safe to breathe after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

A three judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared this week that EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and other agency officials can't be held constitutionally liable for making rosy declarations about air quality after the World Trade Center's destruction.

The opinion, written by the court's chief judge, Dennis Jacobs, said opening EPA workers up to lawsuits for giving out bad information during a crisis could have a catastrophic side effect.

"Officials might default to silence in the face of the public's urgent need for information," Jacobs wrote.[..]

Some preliminary scientific studies have indicated that as many as 400,000 people were exposed to toxic ground zero dust. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have fallen ill, and several have died from lung ailments blamed on inhaled Trade Center ash.

Somewhere over the heartland of this country, there are porcine aviators fluttering in the sky. The state that has more state executions than the rest now thinks it might be a bad idea? Maybe Texas really is moving towards disavowing George Bush.

Off The Kuff:

Wow. The Dallas Morning News looks at some high profile death penalty cases in Texas and realizes that the system is irrevocably broken.

And that uncomfortable truth has led this editorial board to re-examine its century-old stance on the death penalty. This board has lost confidence that the state of Texas can guarantee that every inmate it executes is truly guilty of murder. We do not believe that any legal system devised by inherently flawed human beings can determine with moral certainty the guilt of every defendant convicted of murder.
That is why we believe the state of Texas should abandon the death penalty - because we cannot reconcile the fact that it is both imperfect and irreversible.[..]

Powerful stuff, especially considering the source. As you know, I am not philosophically opposed to the death penalty. I have always believed that for some crimes, and for some criminals, it's the only appropriate response. But it's also been clear for a long time that the system has many cracks in it, and that too many people have fallen through them. From prosecutorial misconduct to bad eyewitness identifications to incompetent defense attorneys to an impenetrable appeals process that is completely indifferent to questions of innocence, we have lost any right to say that the death penalty is applied in a fair and impartial manner, assuming we were ever able to say that.

NYTimes:

A federal appeals panel ruled yesterday that a class-action lawsuit against investment banks over their role as advisers to Enron cannot go ahead, dealing a blow to shareholders who lost billions of dollars after the company collapsed in 2001.

While shareholders can still pursue individual claims against the banks, the decision stymies any mass effort by shareholders to recoup $40 billion in losses from the Wall Street banks that had earned millions of dollars in banking fees from Enron.

"This is a devastating ruling for shareholders," said Thomas R. Ajamie, a Houston securities lawyer. "It's hard to believe that shareholders won't recovery money from an admitted fraud, but this U.S. Court of Appeals circuit has been more hostile to investors than other circuits have been."

In its opinion, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said: "Presuming plaintiffs' allegations to be true, Enron committed fraud by misstating its accounts, but the banks only aided and abetted that fraud by engaging in transactions to make it more plausible; they owed no duty to Enron's shareholders."

So they aided and abetted fraud, but owe no duty to the victims of that fraud? You have to twist your mind into a pretzel to wrap around that logic.