his vorpal sword: Indiana racist email story expolodes
Andy Worthington: Three innocent men released from Gitmo
Shakesville: What's wrong with (not just young people) everybody now
naked capitalism: How well has the Federal Reserve performed for America?
Open Left: Post Office zip code change prompts Insurance industry to attempt jacking up rates
Respectful Insolence: Quackery at HuffPo
On This Week with George Stephanopoulus:
The Obama Administration is trying to engineer a soft-landing for the President's promise to close Guantanamo by January 22, 2010.
Friday morning White House officials told me that some detainees would still be in Gitmo after the deadline after this story broke in the Washington Post. And in our 'This Week' interview, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that "it's going to take a little longer" than promised to close the prison.
Here’s our full exchange:
STEPHANOPOULOS: A major story in "The Washington Post" suggesting that the president's deadline of January 22nd for closing Guantanamo will not be met. And White House officials tell me that at least some prisoners will still be in Guantanamo on January 22nd and beyond. How big a setback is that and how long will it take to finally close Guantanamo?
GATES: When the president elect met with his new national security team in Chicago on December 7th...
STEPHANOPOULOS: 2009.
GATES: ...last year, this issue was discussed, about closing Guantanamo and executive orders to do that and so on. And the question was, should we set a deadline? Should we pin ourselves down? I actually was one of those who said we should because I know enough from being around this town that if you don't put a deadline on something, you'll never move the bureaucracy. But I also said and then if we find we can't get it done by that time but we have a good plan, then you're in a position to say it's going to take us a little longer but we are moving in the direction of implementing the policy that the president set. And I think that's the position that we're in.
STEPHANOPOULOS: That's where we are. So the deadline of January 22nd will not be met?
GATES: It's going to be tough.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And -- and how many prisoners will be there on January 22nd, do you know?
GATES: I don't know the answer to that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Is it -- but, as you said, it's going to be tough and likely will not be met.
GATES: We'll see.
Well, I'm just going to say it: Obama gives a very nice speech, but his plans worry me. Ever see "Minority Report," the movie with Tom Cruise? Set in the future, he works for the Department of Pre-Crime. The police use technology to predict who will commit crimes, and they arrest them before the crimes happen.
Don't pretty this up, folks. This is exactly the position Obama expressed in his speech today, and if we keep silent simply because he's a Democrat, well, we're not doing our job as citizens of this democratic republic.
I agree wholeheartedly with what Digby said:
I know it's a mess, but the fact is that this isn't really that difficult, except in the usual beltway kabuki political sense. There are literally tens of thousands of potential terrorists all over the world who could theoretically harm America. We cannot protect ourselves from that possibility by keeping the handful we have in custody locked up forever, whether in Guantanamo or some Super Max prison in the US. It's patently absurd to obsess over these guys like it makes us even the slightest bit safer to have them under indefinite lock and key so they "can't kill Americans."
The mere fact that we are doing this makes us less safe because the complete lack of faith we show in our constitution and our justice systems is what fuels the idea that this country is weak and easily terrified. There is no such thing as a terrorist suspect who is too dangerous to be set free. They are a dime a dozen, they are all over the world and for every one we lock up there will be three to take his place. There is not some finite number of terrorists we can kill or capture and then the "war" will be over and the babies will always be safe. This whole concept is nonsensical.
The real terrorists, I'm afraid, are the self-serving hawks who promise to explode a political dirty bomb in the halls of the capitol every time someone tries to be sensible about American foreign policy and national security. They are still running things. They have always run things. And the sorry fact is that their dominance is a decades long model of bipartisan comity.
So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.
In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing. That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."
And Will Bunch sums up:
No matter how much Obama tries to blame this on the Cheney torture policies (which created that inadmissible evidence), two wrongs don't make a right. What he's proposing is against one of this country's core principles, which is habeas corpus. No matter how many guidelines that Obama and his administration try to impose, there is nothing in the Constitution that would permit the indefinite jailing of people "who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes" but who "nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States" -- nor should their be. Not even if we ever do develop the mind-reading powers of a "thought police."
This is why people need to keep the pressure on Obama -- even those inclined to view his presidency favorably. Because while clearly his overall approach to torture and detention issues are "on the right track" as opposed to the very "wrong track" of Cheney and Bush, it is so easy inside the Beltway to start veering off the rails. Making people accountable for the torture and Guantanamo debacles of the Bush years requires the American people constantly holding our new president accountable, too.
Dan Froomkin has a great post up about the newly released torture memos and he knows this is only the beginning.
The full extent of what was done in our name remains unclear, and there are still big gaps in our understanding of how it all came to pass. Just how many people were detained by the U.S. government in the so-called “war on terror”? How many of them should never have been held in the first place? How many of them were mistreated, and how badly? Did torture and abuse produce valuable information? How much did it embolden our enemies? How many people knew what was going on? Where in the chain of command does the responsibility lie? Why didn’t more people object? How direct was the link between what happened in the offices of the president and vice president and the cells of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? How willful was the administration’s corruption of the law?
And it’s not just torture and detention. When it comes to warrantless surveillance, for instance, what little we know about the program as it still exists today is still considerably more than we know about the program as it operated before the revolt in Bush’s own Justice Department. What were we doing from 2001 to 2004 such that even John Ashcroft couldn’t bring himself to approve it any longer? How many people have been wiretapped without a warrant? What happened to all the data?
The public overwhelmingly wants some sort of official inquiry. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, nearly two thirds of Americans support an investigation into the treatment of terror suspects during the Bush administration – although they are split on whether it should be conducted by an independent panel or by federal prosecutors.
Journalists have a special role here. Not only can we keep chipping away at the truth – but we can and should remind members of the public, over and over again, about all the facts that remain hidden from them, including information about acts committed in their name that had -- and continue to have -- profound moral and legal implications. We should also remind Americans that our moral stature on the globe has been -- and will remain -- seriously damaged until or unless there is some sort of process of reckoning and accountability. And while there’s no need for journalists to get involved in partisan battles, when the question at hand is whether the nation will avert its eyes or face up to the truth, it’s entirely appropriate for journalists to take a stand.
NiemanWatchDog is having a series devoted to these questions. Journalists, please do your jobs.
This is just crazy. I'd like to think there's a logical explanation:
LONDON (Reuters) - Two senior British judges accused the United States on Wednesday of threatening to end intelligence cooperation if Britain released evidence about the alleged torture of a Guantanamo detainee.
The judges quoted lawyers for British Foreign Secretary David Miliband as saying the U.S. government, by reviewing intelligence cooperation, "could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains."
According to the ruling from High Court judges Lord Justice Thomas and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones, Miliband's lawyers said the threat had existed for some time and was still in place under President Barack Obama's administration.
British media had applied to the court for the release of full details of the evidence the British government held about the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who is held in Guantanamo Bay.
The judges ruled it would not be in the public interest to expose Britain to the "real risk" outlined by the foreign secretary's lawyers.
I know that comedy should push the envelope occasionally and make you uncomfortable, but sorry, I'm having a hard time finding teh funny in this SNL skit from last night.
Cast member Jason Sudeikis plays a federal agent eager to rid Gitmo of instruments of torture in its "Going Out of Business" sale.
What does it say about this country that we can joke about torturing others with car batteries, jumper cables and waterboarding? Woo hoo, it's hilarious to offer german shepherds used to threaten and terrorize detainees on a "buy two, get the third for free" deal. Here's a knee slapper: let's violate the Geneva Conventions, but don't look back for accountability to those responsible, and hey, maybe we'll joke about it on the longest-running comedy program on American network television!
Nope, still not finding teh funny.
President-elect Obama has been taking all of us on an emotional roller-coaster ride of late. On Sunday, he told ABC that closing the base at Guantánamo would be very difficult and probably wouldn't happen in the first 100 days of his administration. On Monday afternoon, it was leaked that the transition team is drawing up an executive order to close Gitmo the first week of the presidency. Tumultuous and gut-wrenching? Yes and yes.
On Tuesday morning, Bush administration lawyers appealed a Guantánamo military judge’s decision last October to throw out tainted evidence against Afghan national Mohammed Jawad, evidence the military judge had held was the product of torture. The government has admitted that the torture-derived evidence was the centerpiece of its prosecution.
Jawad has been tortured or abused repeatedly – first by Afghan authorities and then by U.S. personnel, both in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo. In Guantánamo, Jawad was subjected to the now-infamous "frequent-flyer" sleep-deprivation program in which detainees are kept awake and constantly moved from cell to cell. Jawad was moved 112 times in a 14-day period.
ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi attended the hearing before the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review in Washington, D.C. on the Bush administration’s appeal, and reports that the commission judges seemed offended by the government’s assertion that the Fifth Amendment does not apply to detainees in U.S. custody. “Even in the waning days of the Bush administration, government attorneys asked an American court to permit evidence derived from torture,” Shamsi said.Also on Tuesday morning, the ACLU filed a habeas corpus petition in U.S. federal court on behalf of Jawad, challenging his unlawful detention. Most notable in this filing is a statement made in support of the ACLU’s petition by Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the former lead prosecutor in Jawad’s military commission case. In September last year, Lt. Col. Vandeveld asked to be taken off the case and reassigned because he could not ethically proceed with prosecuting Jawad under the current military commission system, which he found deeply flawed and unethical. In Tuesday's filing, Vandeveld states:
[H]ad I been returned to Afghanistan or Iraq, and had I encountered Mohammed Jawad in either of those hostile lands, where two of my friends have been killed in action and another one of my very best friends in the world had been terribly wounded, I have no doubt at all—none—that Mr. Jawad would pose no threat whatsoever to me, his former prosecutor and now-repentant persecutor. Six years is long enough for a boy of sixteen to serve in virtual solitary confinement, in a distant land, for reasons he may never fully understand...Mr. Jawad should be released to resume his life in a civil society, for his sake, and for our own sense of justice and perhaps to restore a measure of our basic humanity.
Another wrinkle: Unless Obama shuts down Guantánamo and the military commissions immediately upon taking office, his administration will stumble into a major human rights crisis. A mere six days after Obama is sworn in, the military commission trial of Omar Khadr, who, like Jawad, was a teenager when he was captured and detained in U.S. custody, will begin.
If Obama allows the trial to proceed, Khadr will be the first person in recent history to be tried by any western nation for alleged war crimes committed as a child. Such a trial would be in violation of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the U.S. signed in 2000 and ratified in 2002.
To avoid such a human rights debacle, we urged the President-elect to drop the military commission charges against Khadr and either repatriate him to Canada or, if there is evidence to support it, to prosecute him in U.S. federal courts in accordance with international child protection and fair trial standards.
President-elect Obama voted against the legislation that authorized the Guantánamo military commissions, calling the law “a betrayal of American values.” And he has co-sponsored legislation designed to stop the use of child soldiers in armed conflict. We're asking that immediately upon taking office, President-elect Obama must stop the travesty of war crimes prosecutions of young men who were children when they were captured. And we’re asking for that change to come immediately, not eventually.
You can join us in this effort: go to www.aclu.org/askobama and send a message to him through the change.gov website. Tell him to end this unlawful system before it's too late.
Suzanne Ito writes for and manages Blog of Rights, the blog of the national ACLU.
In a fascinating interview with Scott Horton, investigative journalist Jane Mayer talks about her new book, The Dark Side, which chronicles the Bush administration's dealings with torture, and offers some incredible (and depressing) insight into her superb reporting over the past few years.
The reaction of top Bush Administration officials to the ICRC report, from what I can gather, has been defensive and dismissive. They reject the ICRC’s legal analysis as incorrect. Yet my reporting shows that inside the White House there has been growing fear of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the detainees. This nervousness resulted in the successful effort to add retroactive immunity to the Military Commission Act. Cheney personally spearheaded this effort. Fear of the consequences of exposure also weighed heavily in discussions about whether to shut the CIA program down. In White House meetings, Cheney warned that if they transferred the CIA’s prisoners to Guantanamo, “people will want to know where they have been—and what we’ve been doing with them.” Alberto Gonzales, a source said, “scared” everyone about the possibility of war crimes prosecutions. It was on their minds.
I strongly suggest you read the entire interview, but this paragraph really stuck with me:
The sadistic treatment of Abu Zubayda also seems to have affected him psychologically in bizarre ways. Two sources said that he became sexually obsessive, masturbating so much his captors feared he would injure himself. One described him as acting “like a monkey at the zoo.” A physician was called in for consultation—one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program. (I personally feel that the medical and psychological professionals who have used their skills to further a program designed to cause pain and suffering should be a high priority in terms of accountability. It has long been a ghastly aspect of torture, worldwide, that doctors and other medical professionals often assist. The licensing boards and professional societies are worthless, in my view, if they don’t demand serious investigations of such unethical uses of science.)
Mayer also says that although Bush officials feared prosecution and frantically sought protection via legislation like the atrocious Military Commissions Act, lawsuit are not likely because many of those in Congress who would spearhead such legal actions are themselves compromised:
An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised. [...] My guess is that the real accountability for President Bush will be in the history books, not the court room.
Glenn Greenwald pounces and tears apart the Democrats for their complicity in Bush's torture regime/war crimes.
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I've alternated between calling life under the Bush administration as some Carrollian absurdity and an Orwellian nightmare. Turns out that we in the liberal blogosphere aren't the only ones making some literary allusions.
First up in our ever-growing list of scandals is Halliburton subsidiary KBR, who will finally be subject to an investigation and hearing over 13 electrocutions deaths in their facilities in Iraq. Despite being notified that the electrical system was not grounded in the shower area way back in 2004, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth died in January of this year from the improper grounding of the water pump in his barracks. Maseth's family is suing KBR civilly for their negligence in maintaining the facilities for the Department of Defense.
Next scandal du jour comes from an ex-22 year CIA veteran, suing the Bush adminstration to declassify documents that show that they were deliberately suppressing information that he provided that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Told on five occasions to falsify his report or not to file it at all, the agent, who is fluent in Farsi and Arabic (because those aren't valuable skills in Bush's War on Terror™), was fired, after several attempts to discredit him turned up nothing. Out of curiosity, how many times do we have to have experts tell us the Bush administration is wrong about Iran's nuclear designs before the media stops furthering that narrative?
And finally, we have Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese-born Muslim who has been detained at Guantanamo for more than six years. The heavily censored judicial review has become public and the Fed's case against Parhat was so flimsy--citing the same source multiple times, the accusations based on "bare and unverifiable" claims that even the judicial panel was compelled to cite Lewis Carroll's nonsensical poem, The Hunting of the Snark:
''We are not persuaded,'' the panel wrote.
"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true.''
Then for the sake of clarity, it disclosed its source:
Through the Looking-Glass author Lewis Carroll's 1876 poem called The Hunting of the Snark, an account of an absurd international voyage by a 10-member crew whose names all begin with `B.'
They include a baker, a beaver, a bellman and a barrister. The ruling went so far as to quote the relevant line, I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.
Despite this slapdown, the Justice Department has not decided how to move forward with Parhat.
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Lord, save us from the idiot pundit class. The smackdown the Supreme Court gave the Bush administration is making the GOP very unhappy. I mean, how dare we consider a fundamental building block of justice since the Magna Carta anything less than an unacceptable allowance for activist judges?
And how do we know it's a bad decision? Fear, fear, fear!!!! Newt says it'll cost us a city! A notion not far off from Scalia's remarkably legal citation-free dissent that this decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." Oooohhh....be afraid, America. Little obnoxiously liberal notions like the right for people like Maher Arar to know why he was detained and to prove his innocence are things that the Republicans don't think they should have to held to.
Mr. GINGRICH: On the other hand, I will say, the recent Supreme Court decision to turn over to a local district judge decisions of national security and life and death that should be made by the president and the Congress is the most extraordinarily arrogant and destructive decision the Supreme Court has made in its history.
REID: In its history.
Mr. GINGRICH: In its history. Worse than Dred Scott, worse than--because--for this following reason: The court has now knowingly stepped in--and this morning's newspapers say smugglers had actually gotten the design of a nuclear weapon, that we now have the evidence that people out there had a nuclear weapon design. And this court is saying that any random district judge, based on whatever their personal caprice is, whatever their personal ideological bias, can intervene with a terrorist in such a way--and this is something that the Italians will tell you about fighting the mafia.
Worse than Dred Scott? Wasn't that a dog whistle used by GWB for indicating the kind of justices he'd pick for SCOTUS? And the whole "mushroom cloud" fear of smugglers getting nuclear plans? Dude, it's called the Google. It's not hard to get bomb plans online or in the library, for that matter--manufacturing them is another issue. But that has NOTHING to do with the Boumediene case. Boumediene said that habeas corpus still applied at Guantanamo, despite its location in Cuba because the US has sovereign rights over it and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus.
But again, facts have a liberal bias, don't they, Newt?
Transcripts below the fold:
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This is what aggravates me so much about the Sunday "news" shows. There is so much lying and muddying of the waters so that the average American--who doesn't have the time to read judicial decisions--doesn't understand that the Supreme Court basically told the Bush administration that they are operating outside of the established laws of the country for the third time in the way that they are prosecuting their War on Terror™. Former Senator and indolent presidential contender Fred Thompson appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos to provide his "Law & Order"-honed gravitas to the false assertion (and GOP platform) that the recent Supreme Court decision saying that Guantanamo detainees have a right to habeas corpus is somehow destroying this country.
After years of trying to make the unitary executive a more powerful branch of the government, the GOP seems upset that the Court would remind them that new laws enacted would be subject to review by the judicial branch...that whole Constitution thing being more of a suggestion than a system of government, apparently. Thompson claims that our laws are more liberal as they ever have been, which is odd, considering that the ones they sought to strike have been in place since the founding of the country. In fact, referencing Marbury v. Madison (1803), Justice Kennedy wrote: *
(T)he writ of habeas corpus is itself an indispensable mechanism for monitoring the separation of powers. The test for determining the scope of this provision must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain.
But I guess it's too much to ask for a Republican to actually respect the Constitution.
Transcripts below the fold
*Corrected to properly attribute quote
