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Rachel Maddow talks to Princeton's Melissa Harris-Lacewell about the latest astroturf "9-12" protests being used by the likes of Glenn Beck and FreedomWorks to exploit the memory of what happened on 9-11.

MADDOW: No right-wing fury over anything President Obama does is complete until we‘ve heard from former half-term Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin.

Her take-away from last night‘s speech on health care reform, according to her Facebook page, was this—quote, “President Obama delivered an offhand applause line tonight about the cost of the war on terror. As we approach the anniversary of the September 11th attacks and honor those who died that day, and those who have died since in the war on terror, in order to secure our freedoms, we need to remember their sacrifices and not demonize them as having had too high a price tag.”

OK. Never mind that the president‘s remark was a cost comparison between health reform and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and never mind that the Iraq war and 9/11 still have nothing to do with one another despite how inconvenient that is, Sarah Palin is staying in the news now by using 9/11 to try to score political points against President Obama on the eve of the anniversary of the attacks.

But that cynical patriotism, it turns out, is merely an appetizer before the main course of exploiting a national tragedy that this year has been prepared for September 12th by the sous chef of politics as performance art, Mr. Glenn Lee Beck.

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July 25, 2009 MSNBC.

From The New York Times--Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests:

WASHINGTON — Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

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Glenn Greenwald:

Though it received very little press attention, it is not hyperbole to observe that this October 23 Memo was one of the most significant events in American politics in the last several decades, because it explicitly declared the U.S. Constitution -- the Bill of Rights -- inoperative inside the U.S., as applied to U.S. citizens. Just read what it said in arguing that neither the Fourth Amendment -- nor even the First Amendment -- can constrain what the President can do when overseeing "domestic military operations" (I wrote about that Memo when it was released last March and excerpted the most revealing and tyrannical portions: here).

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General Petraeus just threw a wrench in the whining conservative rants against torture and the closing of Guantanamo Bay:

General David Petraeus said this past weekend that President Obama's decision to close down Gitmo and end harsh interrogation techniques would benefit the United States in the broader war on terror.

In an appearance on Radio Free Europe on Sunday, the man hailed by conservatives as the preeminent military figure of his generation left little room for doubt about where he stands on some of Obama's most contentious policies.

"I think, on balance, that those moves help [us]," said the chief of U.S. Central Command. "In fact, I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines.

"With respect to Guantanamo," Petraeus added, "I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice -- I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary -- again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees."...read on

I guess the Cheney/Limbaugh crowd will not like this very much. Will they actually come out against him? I think so. It's their way. I'm waiting for Rush to start attacking him very quickly. Maybe he'll say something like "Gen. Petraeus has been infected with Socialism and is now lost to us."

Jon Stolz writes this on VetVoice:

Of course, this flies in the face of the Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney crowd - those who believe that we're safer when we do things that serve as great recruiting tools for al Qaeda.

I'm guessing this disqualifies him from any kind of "Draft Petraeus" efforts on the Republican side.

The transcript from the interview is from Radio Free Europe is below the fold:

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Well, it seems Tom Ridge isn't a Rush Limbaugh fan. On yesterday's State of the Union show on CNN:

KING: Where's Tom Ridge?

Are you in the Rush Limbaugh/Dick Cheney version of the Republican Party or the Colin Powell version of the Republican Party?

RIDGE: I'm in the Tom Ridge version of the party. And my version of the party is simply, when you're asked to serve, as I have been by two Republican presidents -- one gave me a draft notice and sent me to Vietnam and the other called me away from the office I had led as governor, and neither one asked me where I stood on gay rights or abortion. They said, "Will you serve?"

And I think, for the American public -- for the Republican Party to restore itself is not as a regional party but as a national party. We have to be far less judgmental about disagreements within the party and far more judgmental about our disagreement with our friends on the other side of the aisle.

KING: You've used those terms, "need to be less shrill, less judgmental." Who's being shrill? Who's being judgmental?

RIDGE: Well, I think a lot of our commentators are being shrill. I mean, I don't disagree...

KING; Rush?

RIDGE: Yes, I -- listen, Rush Limbaugh has an audience of 20 million people. A lot of people listen, daily, to him and live by very word. But words mean things, and how you use words is very important.

KING: I want to be clear, though. You think Rush is among those being too judgmental, too shrill?

RIDGE: Well, I think -- I think Rush -- Rush articulates his point of views in ways that offend very many. It's a matter of -- matter of language and a matter of how you use words. And it does get the base all fired up, and he's got strong following. But, personally, if he would listen to me -- and I doubt if he would -- the notion is, express yourselves, but let's respect others' opinions. And let's not be divisive.

Let's lead our party based on some principles that have been very much a part of who we are for decades, and let's be less shrill, in terms of -- and, particularly, not attack other individuals. Let's attack their ideas. Let's explain, in a rational, thoughtful, responsible and reasonable way why our ideas and our approach are more acceptable, why they should be more acceptable to the average citizen.

With Ridge the dynamic is kind of interesting, because he doesn't have go groveling to the Flaming Gasbag, so he may not wind up being forced to.

He also made clear that he disagreed with Dick Cheney:

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Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:

By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.

I've seen this movie before. In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself.

Of course, as has been pointed out, we know that--irrespective of facts--this case will be held up as some great triumph in the War on Terror™, a frighteningly close call thwarted by those (implicitly, in the previous administration) who understood the nature of the threat. Mmmm'kay....

Preying on these losers, none of whom were apparently actual Muslims, the "confidential informant" orchestrated the acquisition of a disabled Stinger missile to shoot down military planes and cooked up a wild scheme about attacking a Jewish center in the Bronx.

It gets even more pathetic:

The only one of the four suspects who appears to have aroused any suspicion was Payen, a Haitian native who attended the Newburgh mosque. Assistant imam Hamid Rashada said his dishevelment and odd behavior disturbed some members, said the assistant imam, Hamid Rashada.

When Payen appeared in court, defense attorney Marilyn Reader described him as "intellectually challenged" and on medication for schizophrenia. The Associated Press said that when he was asked if he understood the proceedings, Payen replied: "Sort of."

Despite the pompous statements from Mayor Bloomberg of New York and other politicians, including Representative Peter King, the whole story is bogus. The four losers may have been inclined to violence, and they may have harbored a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. But it seems that the informant whipped up their violent tendencies and their hatred of Jews, cooked up the plot, incited them, arranged their purchase of weapons, and then had them busted. To ensure that it made headlines, the creepy informant claimed to be representing a Pakistani extremist group, Jaish-e Muhammad, a bona fide terrorist organization. He wasn't, of course.

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May 15, 2009 CNN's American Morning:

ROBERTS: As you know, the most recent former Vice President Dick Cheney has come out quite strongly against the Obama administration, saying that its policies have left America less safe than it was during the Bush administration.

You were a big critic of the previous administration, particularly in the run-up to the war and thereafter. What do you think of Vice President Cheney's statements that the Obama administration's policies are leaving this country less safe?

GORE: Well, obviously, I strongly disagree.

And, you know, I waited two years after I left office to make statements that were critical, and then of the policy. You know, you talk about somebody that shouldn't be talking about making the country less safe, invading a country that did not attack us and posed no serious threat to us at all. You know, he can speak for himself.

And I have a feeling that members of his own party wish that he would not do that. But I'll let that be an argument between him and them.

ROBERTS: Are you suggesting that it's unusual for a former vice president, former administration official that high-ranking to come out this early in a new administration and be this critical?

GORE: You know, look, that's a judgment call and he's made his judgment. He has become, in many ways, the leading spokesman for his party during this period of time. And the message is one that he's deciding to deliver.

Look, I'm going to focus on trying to build bipartisan alliances around this country for American leadership to solve the climate crisis. And I don't want to get dragged into an argument with Dick Cheney about what he's getting into. I'm just going to let him speak for himself.

ROBERTS: Oh, Mr. Vice President, you know I would never try to do that with you.

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Nancy Pelosi rebuts the right-wing frothing accusing her of knowing about waterboarding after having been briefed on it by the Bush White House:

WASHINGTON - Under strong attack from Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA and Bush administration of misleading her about waterboarding detainees in the war on terror and sharply rebutted claims she was complicit in its use.

"To the contrary ... we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used," she told reporters, referring to a formal CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

Pelosi said she subsequently learned that other lawmakers were told several months later by the CIA about the use of waterboarding.

Oh, the wingnuts will go crazy. But Pelosi is certainly more credible about this than Dick Cheney or John "Orange Man" Boehner.

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There's just so much garbage in this clip, it's hard to sort it all out. But garbage it is and sort we must. I think that it's instructive to remember as we wade through this textbook example of fallacious logic that Newt Gingrich is considered the great scholar of the GOP. No wonder the GOP doesn't seem able to think their way out of the tea bag they put themselves in.

Still holding the talking points given to him by the Bush administration's Revisionist History Tour™, Newtie tries to muddy the waters by simultaneously claiming that the Clinton and Obama administrations did or do not take the War on Terror™ as seriously as the Bush administration, but also find that the tactics used by the Bush administration in their pursuit of against terrorism are so acceptable that they haven't tried outlawing them yet. HUH????

(S)ince 1993 when seven people were killed at the World Trade Center, we’ve had two cycles. We had a Clinton administration that thought this was a criminal problem, that issued -- that refused to allow the CIA and the FBI to cooperate, that refused to pressure Saudi Arabia or Yemen to go after people who were killing our folks. And then you had a Bush administration that said this is a war.

Hmm...interesting revisionism. Let's recall, Newtie, that the Clinton administration actually caught and prosecuted the "blind sheik" responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, unlike the Bush administration, who declared war on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and killed millions of Iraqis but left Osama Bin Laden uncaught. That's a successful strategy, innit?

WALLACE: I want to ask you about one other aspect of this. Pelosi says even if she was briefed on this that there was nothing she could do because these were classified briefings. She and the Republican chairman of the committee got this information. There’s nothing they could do.

You as House speaker received these kinds of briefings back in the ‘90s. If you objected to a secret operation, was there something you could do?

GINGRICH: Sure. I mean, the first thing you do is call the president and tell him you will feel compelled to pass a law cutting off the money. I mean, there are lots of things you can do if you want to do it. The Congress is pretty powerful if it wants to be.

And second, you know, they’ve had control since January of 2007. They haven’t passed a law making waterboarding illegal. They haven’t gone into any of these things and changed law. In fact, they’ve had several -- they -- recently, you find that Attorney General Holder’s own Justice Department is saying, “Well, you know, some of these memos are actually right. They’re not wrong.”

Um, Newt? You do know that waterboarding is already illegal, don't you? Oh great historian of the GOP, can you tell me what happened to those Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American GIs during WWII? So Congress should make waterboarding illegal again otherwise they condone the act? Astonishing lack of logic there.

So this is -- what we’re seeing now in a very sad way is as bitter a partisan attack on the Bush people as we’ve seen since the McCarthy era. The degree that they’re putting specific people at risk for criminal prosecution is unprecedented in modern America.

Never let be said that today's GOP isn't the most persecuted bunch of privileged white folk in the history of mankind. Jeez. Here's another way to look at it, Newt: Specific people are at risk for criminal prosecution because of THEIR UNPRECEDENTED CRIMINAL ACTS. "Rule of Law" party, my aunt Fanny.

Which brings me to my final point, the implied slur against AG Eric Holder for his firm's representation of Yemeni detainees at Gitmo. Somehow this is siding with terrorists to actually respect our legal system. While Holder himself did not actually work on those Gitmo cases, the fact remains--and I'm sure that this comes as a shock to Gingrich--but not all attorneys think their clients are innocent. They are just interested in making sure that justice is served by a fair trial.

Obviously, the concepts of fairness and justice are alien to Gingrich.

Transcripts (courtesy of CQ Politics) below the fold

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This Sunday, Steve Croft of 60 Minutes reported on the state of the insurgency in Pakistan, explaining it as a concerted attempt by Islamists to take over that nation. He even spoke to President Zardari:

Asked how important it is to stop extremism, President Zardari told Kroft, "It’s important enough. I lost my wife to it. My children's mother, the most populist leader of Pakistan. It's important to stop them and make sure that it doesn't happen again and they don't take over our way of life. That's what they want to do."

..."Right now, you have a situation in the Swat area. It’s only three hours from Islamabad where the Taliban is very strong there," Kroft remarked. "How did that happen?"

"It's been happening over time. And it's happened out of denial. Everybody was in denial that they're weak and they won't be able to take over. That, they won't be able to give us a challenge. And our forces weren't increased. And therefore we have weaknesses. And they are taking advantage of that weakness," Zardari explained.

Also on Sunday, news came of Pakistani attempts to sign a truce with the Taliban, one that would involve Sharia supplanting Pakistani national laws there. Pakistani officials deny any disconnect between Zardari's warning of an existential threat and the peace deal: "We are not compromising with militants, instead trying to isolate the militants, and for that I do not think America will have any objection," said Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi - but previous such truces, which were meant to end Islamist terror attacks which have plagued Pakistan, have swiftly collapsed because the Taliban know they are winning and can keep demanding concessions. Large chunks of Pakistan are now in Taliban control, and there seems to be no will in the ruling Pakistani feudal elite to seriously contest that.

Indeed, the will of the Pakistani elite may well be largely in favor of Taliban control. A disconnect between word and action exists whether Pakistani officials want to admit it or not and it shouldn't be forgotten that the Taliban and other regional Islamist militant groups are largely the making of Pakistan's ISI spy service and army in the first place. Pakistan has long conducted its foreign policy in the region by the use of these proxies and may now have "gone native", casting in their lot with their creations while pretending otherwise to ward of Western anger and to gain US military aid. Chair of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen thinks he's building trust with Zardari - the most corrupt politician in a land rife with them - and Army chief Kyani - who was the head of the ISI while their Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out a 2006 bombing spree in Mumbai and planned the 2008 attacks. One wonders how someone so gullible could rise to his position.

Even so, reaching for the military as the right hammer for every nail, especially every Pakistani nail, is unwise. Over 80% of Pakistanis see the "War on Terror" as a Western concern, one their feudal leaders have un-necessarily enmeshed themselves in. Poking the hornets nest with a stick accomplishes nothing except stirring up hornets and if the US keeps poking Pakistan, intelligence analysts have warned, its most likely just to turn that disaproval into outright anger and hasten an extremist takeover.

Meanwhile, across the border in Afghanistan, the hawks' plan for a generations-long occupation there is hitting some snags too. President Karzai has lost patience with Western leaders who talk about caring but don't seem to care enough to stop causing civilian casualties. He's indicated that he'd like to see a timetable for withdrawal and in return the Obama administration has indicated it would like to see him gone, replaced by someone more malleable and (hopefully) less corrupt in the wrong ways. Karzai said Sunday that he believed rumors about his alleged drug-lord brother were being circulated by the US to drive Karzai himself from office and he's doing some outreach to the Russians instead.

The Af/Pak knot isn't getting any easier to unentangle, but one thing is for sure - saying "trust us, we're the good Romans", as Admiral Mullen and others advocate, isn't going to help cut it.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

The Washington Post today reports that clearing up Bush's Gitmo mess is complicated by the fact that case files on detainees there are incomplete, disorganised and in many instances don't exist at all. One "senior official" from the Bush administration says that's not true and Obama's people "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. The senior former official also admitted that "he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself."

That anonymous, secondhand, self-exoneration of the Bush administration is apparently good enough for the those who have always been glad to march in step with the Fourth Branch. Boston Herald editor and Pajamas media columnist Jules Crittenden believes it, for one, and launches into an apologia for the Bush administration involving a claim that any and all confusion is entirely due to intelligence agencies being unwilling to share with each other. But Hilzoy brings us an actual named eyewitness: LTC Darrel Vandeveld was lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. The following is from his statement in support of Jawad's habeas petition.

"7. It is important to understand that the "case files" compiled at OMC-P or developed by CITF are nothing like the investigation and case files assembled by civilian police agencies and prosecution offices, which typically follow a standardized format, include initial reports of investigation, subsequent reports compiled by investigators, and the like. Similarly, neither OMC-P nor CITF maintained any central repository for case files, any method for cataloguing and storing physical evidence, or any other system for assembling a potential case into a readily intelligible format that is the sine qua non of a successful prosecution. While no experienced prosecutor, much less one who had performed his or her duties in the fog of war, would expect that potential war crimes would be presented, at least initially, in "tidy little packages," at the time I inherited the Jawad case, Mr. Jawad had been in U.S. custody for approximately five years. It seemed reasonable to expect at the very least that after such a lengthy period of time, all available evidence would have been collected, catalogued, systemized, and evaluated thoroughly -- particularly since the suspect had been imprisoned throughout the entire time the case should have been undergoing preparation.

8. Instead, to the shock of my professional sensibilities, I discovered that the evidence, such as it was, remained scattered throughout an incomprehensible labyrinth of databases primarily under the control of CITF, or strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks vacated by prosecutors who had departed the Commissions for other assignments. I further discovered that most physical evidence that had been collected had either disappeared or had been stored in locations that no one with any tenure at, or institutional knowledge of, the Commissions could identify with any degree of specificity or certainty. The state of disarray was so extensive that I later learned, as described below, that crucial physical evidence and other documents relevant to both the prosecution and the defense had been tossed into a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten. Although it took me a number of months -- so extensive was the lack of any discernable organization, and so difficult was it for me to accept that the US military could have failed so miserably in six years of effort -- I began to entertain my first, developing doubts about the propriety of attempting to prosecute Mr. Jawad without any assurance that through the exercise of due diligence I could collect and organize the evidence in a manner that would meet our common professional obligations."

It seems obvious that the Bush administration as a whole simply didn't care - it expected prosecutors in what it believed to be a tame tribunal process to hand down convictions anyway and was more than a little surprised when many military lawyers refused to be complicit in the scam.

Crittenden also mentions the "61 detainees who returned to terror" stuff which has been debunked too. It's twelve at most - all released by political decisions made by Bush appointees, quite possibly including the "senior former official" Crittenden trusts so much as to believe his second-hand excuses. Every single one was released because the Bush administration's malfeasance meant charges wouldn't stick, were entirely false or were undermined by illegal methods such as torture and false confessions. That will be true of any other detainees released too - which would be simply sad, if it weren't so very tragic that some will go on to kill innocents. If only the Bush administration's legal hacks had considered that earlier...or indeed at all.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

CNN report via CSpanJunkie

"we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights."
Barrack Obama, July 15, 2008

Well, Musharraf is long gone but his handpicked general, a former head of the ISI, is still in charge of Pakistan's armed forces. And on Friday President Obama's administration carried through on his promise to act. Airstrikes by American pilotless drones killed 17 people in two successive attacks in North and South Waziristan. Although we do not know from reports whether Musharraf's successor as head of the Pakistani army, General Kayani, or President Zardari refused or were unable to take action on any solid intelligence, we do know that three children as well as a "possible" senior Al Qaeda leader were reported killed. The airstrikes were part of a program begun by the Bush administration and authorized to continue by President Obama, but he himself does not personally authorize each strike.

I continue to think this program is a massive mistake. Firstly, on purely "realist" terms for reasons I've long-ago explained and that some reports say the US intelligence community warned Bush about - they're dangerously destabilizing to a nuclear-armed nation on the very precipice of civil collapse. The aim of these raids is to strike at Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida leadership. But if a strike is to kill Bin Laden, or the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar, it will likely do so at a safe house owned by the ISI which would cause an anti-American explosion in Pakistan's military and convulsions in Pakistani society which would certainly oust anyone willing to back the US. Pakistani officials have previously condemned Bush's heavy-handed violation of their sovereignty, leading general katyani to say that such incursions would be prevented "at all costs". If Obama is really looking to stabilize the region, that's about as counter-productive as it is possible to get. As one former Pakistani official put it: "Maybe you'll get the fish, but you'll poison the pond around him." The most obvious retaliation Pakistan could take would be to close the supply route to Afghanistan from Pakistan's ports via the Khyber Pass. That might not hurt US forces much, but it would mean famine in Kabul as the Afghan countryside cannot support the capital on its own.

But secondly because such attacks really are morally unsupportable given the way they are planned and carried out. One attack inside Pakistan has already missed its target and killed entirely innocent civilians instead. We know from events in Afghanistan that the USAF seems to have a terrible predeliction for bombing wedding parties because some tribal enemy fingers the neighbouring village as being a nest of militants. And I simply don't believe the possible death of a "possible terrorist leader" is worth three children's lives under any circumstances. There's no point to reclaiming the moral high ground by closing prisons and banning torture if you're going to hand it away again with indiscriminate airstrikes - and airstrikes are by their nature indiscriminate despite what the PR brochures on "precision" bombs might say.

I've been very impressed with Obama's first couple of days in office but this is one campaign promise I believe he should either u-turn on or consider a drastically out-of-the-box alternative.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

I'd just like to point something out to the many rightwingers who are frothing at the mouth today over the NYT's story that a former Gitmo detainee has become the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch.

The Bush administration released this man in 2007, without trial -a decision made by political appointees, not judicial review - and handed him over to the Saudis who let him walk.

So who is at fault here?

Rather than blaming Obama for wanting to actually put bad guys on trial - proper trial - shouldn't these rightwing pundits be asking why the Bush administration made a political decision to let this guy go? Was there insufficient evidence? Was the evidence tainted by torture? Was he simply an innocent swept up by "arrest for bounty" tactics who became radicalized by his experience? What's the actual evidence for "suspecting" he has "returned" to terror?

Andrew Sullivan was kind enough to link to one of my old posts on this subject the other day in which I wrote:

Some very bad people are likely to walk free along with the innocent because the Bush administration tried to walk around domestic and international principles of law, creating an entirely spurious new designation of “unlawful combatant” so that they could either hide detainees from due process indefinitely or, failing that, conduct kangaroo courts.

If they’d just stuck with the existing definitions, all the Gitmo detainees against whom they could build a real case under the actual rules of law, without torture and without rigging the courts, would have been tried...already. If found guilty, the death penalty would have been warranted in some cases. I would personally have had no problem with that.

That's just the inevitable fallout from Bush's foolhardy actions. There's no real argument about it. But this instance is potentially even worse. If the Bush administration really thought this guy was dangerous and had real evidence to that effect, why did they make the political decision to turn him over to Bush's pals the Saudis instead of putting him on trial?

Crossposted from Newshoggers

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On the eve of his inauguration, Keith Olbermann exhorts President-elect Barack Obama to do the one thing that will tell the world that we are a country of laws, and that will enable us to look forward without fear that we could once again face the trampling of the Constitution and the slide towards totalitarianism we've seen in the last eight years.

Mr. President-Elect, you are entirely correct.As you say, "what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

And that means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush Administration's torture of prisoners -- and starting at the top.

You're also right that you should not "want your first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch-hunt." But your only other option might be to let this sit and fester, indefinitely.

Because, Mr. President-Elect, some day there will be another Republican president -- or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force -- and he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush -- or what you did not do -- and he will see precedent. Or, as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time.

Prosecute, Mr. President-Elect, and even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good, for generations unborn.

It's not as if Olbermann is going out on a limb here. On Obama's own site Change.gov, it's one of the most popular issues (though one the team is reluctant to answer), no doubt aided by Change.org's Bob Fertik's campaign to force it on the President-elect's agenda.

Transcripts below the fold

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ABC News says it has a hold of the secret list of possible locations for building Gitmo's replacement. Somewhere there will be a camp for about 250 detainees, which being on American soil will sideline weasel-worded talk of those detainees not getting things like Habeas rights or fair trials because they're held "abroad".

And "not in my backyard" Nimby Republican politicians, while doubtless agreeing that these detainees have to be held somewhere until their trials are all certain about it not being in their area.

Three San Diego county Congressmen have already voiced opposition to sending the terror detainees to Camp Pendleton.

Congressmen Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Brian Bilbray (R-CA) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) sent a letter Tuesday to Defense Secretary Robert Gates saying Camp Pendleton was too busy preparing Marines for combat.

... A spokesman for Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) said that the Senator called Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen earlier this week to convey his concerns about using Fort Leavenworth to house detainees... Brownback said the use of Leavenworth to house prisoners would interfere with the primary mission of the base which is education.

Sheer recalcitrant and obstructive stupidity. The ABC report makes it plain that the new prison complex will be "built in an isolated and secure area", not right next to existing facilities. If these nimbys had a real reason - say, that it would simplify questions about legal jurisdiction if they were held at a federal rather than military facility -  I'd understand, but they don't. They just want to be seen to oppose an Obama Presidential plan, whatever it is, for selfish political reasons. Whatever happened to the Republican meme that criticising a how the president plans to fight the "great war on terror" for purely political gain is equivalent to aiding the enemy? Oh yeah - IOKIYAR.

Unless, of course, Rachel Maddow is correct in which case these Republicans may be part of a Bush administration ploy to make the case against Gitmo closure by arguing that "dangerous people who have been abused there, who've been tortured there and can't be prosecuted because of that abuse - they still can't be let out," because they will "return to the fight". These nimbys part would be to suggest, ever so slyly, that escaping from a mainland prison would be easier for these "dangerous people" and threaten the safety of military members and their families.

But there are some big flaws in that argument. Not least that 86% of Gitmo detainees have never even been charged or that the Pentagon's claims of the number of former detainees - all released by political order, rather than after trial - returning to terror are entirely made up. Maddow spoke with Seton Hall Law professor about his center's studies, which show just how made up. Watch that interview here, courtesy of Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe.

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Crossposted from Newshoggers

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.