Later On

I can’t praise this series highly enough. If you have children, or if you were once a child, buy it now.

Megan Carpenter in the Washington Independent:

Bloomberg’s long-standing Freedom of Information Act request for a look at who in the financial system took part in the Fed’s now-secret $2 trillion loan program has been granted by a second court on the basis that there exists no exemption to FOIA rules for the continued economic health of private companies. The Fed is expected to continue its efforts to keep this basic information out of the hands of the Americans who paid for the bailout and the investors who might pull their funds from companies that would have otherwise bailed, in order to protect the companies that were saved from supposed imminent failure.

However, for what one assumes are less than coincidental reasons, several banks who also received publicly disclosed TARP funds joined the Fed in its quixotic quest to keep quiet about who took the Fed’s money too. That group includes ABN Amro Bank, Bank of America Corp., The Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo. If it seems to the average layperson that these banks have already basically disclosed that they are among the beneficiaries of the Fed’s largess and haven’t suffered any ill effect, that might underscore Bloomberg’s reasoning that the Fed simply doesn’t want to be subject to any oversight rather than that there are major business concerns with the disclosure.

In particular, the appeals court ruled today that the Fed and the banks who mysteriously don’t want the Fed to disclose the banks that accepted their loans during the financial crisis failed to meet the standard set forth by the FOIA for keeping such information secret.

In its opinion today, the appeals court said that the exception applies only if the agency can satisfy a three-part test. The information must be a trade secret or commercial or financial in character; must be obtained from a person; and must be privileged or confidential, according to the opinion.The court said that the information sought by Bloomberg was not “obtained from” the borrowing banks. It rejected an alternative argument the individual Federal Reserve Banks are “persons,” for purposes of the law because they would not suffer the kind of harm required under the “privileged and confidential” requirement of the exemption.

In other words, the Fed argued that the individual Federal Reserve Banks which comprise the Fed are people, not banks, and thus covered by the law. Unlike the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC, the appeals court rejected the idea that the banks are people or that they would be harmed by disclosing to whom they lent money.

I recall Obama in his campaign promising all sorts of transparency and compliance with FOIA, etc. But, of course, that was campaign Obama. President Obama is pretty far to the right of that guy.

Amazing:

Johns Hopkins scientists have found that a safe and inexpensive antibiotic in use since the 1970s for treating acne effectively targets infected immune cells in which HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, lies dormant and prevents them from reactivating and replicating. The drug, minocycline, likely will improve on the current treatment regimens of HIV-infected patients if used in combination with a standard drug cocktail known as HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy), according to research published now online and appearing in print April 15 in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. "The powerful advantage to using minocycline is that the virus appears less able to develop drug resistance because minocycline targets cellular pathways not viral proteins," says Janice Clements, Ph.D., Mary Wallace Stanton Professor of Faculty Affairs, vice dean for faculty, and professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

"The big challenge clinicians deal with now in this country when treating HIV patients is keeping the virus locked in a dormant state," Clements adds. "While HAART is really effective in keeping down active replication, minocycline is another arm of defense against the virus."

Unlike the drugs used in HAART which target the virus, minocycline homes in on, and adjusts T cells, major immune system agents and targets of HIV infection. According to Clements, minocycline reduces the ability of T cells to activate and proliferate, both steps crucial to HIV production and progression toward full blown AIDS.

If taken daily for life, HAART usually can protect people from becoming ill, but it’s not a cure. The HIV virus is kept at a low level but isn’t ever entirely purged; it stays quietly hidden in some immune cells. If a person stops HAART or misses a dose, the virus can reactivate out of those immune cells and begin to spread.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kate Pickert at TIME’s Swampland blog:

A funny thing happened on the way to the congressional switchboard earlier this week.

On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners to call Congress and tell them to vote no on health care reform. That’s no small thing. With his millions of fans, this is the kind of advice that could crash the congressional phone system.

But Rush made a critical error in his activism and it revealed an insider trick about grassroots organizing and showcased the absolute hatred some of Rush’s listeners feel about Democratic health care reform. Stay with me here – I promise the payoff will be worth it.

FamiliesUSA, a pro-reform activist group, has a toll-free number on its web site, telling supporters: “Call your elected officials at 1-888-876-6242. Tell them that Americans deserve better than the status quo. We need quality, affordable health care NOW.”

People who call this number, however, don’t actually reach elected officials – at first. They reach a recorded message that begins, “Thank you for calling your representatives and your senators. Please urge them to vote yes on health reform…” After the pro-reform message, the call is routed to the actual capitol switchboard. The purpose of this is to two-fold: To give callers a kind of script to say when they do reach members and senators and to spare them the cost of a long-distance call.

Unfortunately for Rush, he gave out the toll-free FamiliesUSA number on his show on Tuesday, which meant his anti-reform listeners got a pro-reform message when they tried to call Congress. So many Rush fans called the FamiliesUSA number on Tuesday that it caused a massive spike in call volume, which was immediately noticed by the group’s telephone re-routing vendor. Not wanting to pick up the tab for anti-reform calls, of course, FamiliesUSA immediately shut down the number and got a new one, which is posted above and now functioning as intended. (FamiliesUSA executive director Ron Pollack says the cost of that brief spike is in the thousands of dollars. “It’s an ironic form of flattery,” he quipped when I reached him earlier today.)

But Rush’s callers didn’t understand this whole re-routing thing and many were absolutely and astoundingly enraged. Many of them assumed the pro-reform message they got was a left-wing conspiracy to take over government. Think this is a stretch?

Here’s a Youtube video posted by one such caller, who believed he had discovered a blatant case of “Obama propaganda…Alert the patriots: Tyrants are ruining our country !”

He’s not alone. After FamiliesUSA turned off their original toll free number, it was bought by someone else who must have known about the mix-up. That new person put a pro-reform bulletin on an answering machine and recorded messages left by angry – and I mean very angry – Rush listeners. WARNING: Many of the message contain obscenities – they can be accessed by calling 206-666-6666.

If you ever had any doubts that there are people out there who truly believe the Democratic health reform plan is a communist conspiracy to take over America…

I have to say that the messages that I heard seem to come from mouth-breathers: uneducated idiots with strong feelings.

Apple juice (the kind you buy) has high levels of yummy arsenic. Thank heavens we can trust food companies to look out for us. More info here.

Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post:

By early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.

“We knew we were going to be forced to shut this thing down,” recalled one former civilian official, describing tense internal discussions in which military commanders argued that the site was putting Americans at risk. “CIA resented that,” the former official said.

Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled the online forum. Although some Saudi officials had been informed in advance about the Pentagon’s plan, several key princes were “absolutely furious” at the loss of an intelligence-gathering tool, according to another former U.S. official.

Four former senior U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrate the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar. The use of computers to gather intelligence or to disrupt the enemy presents complex questions: When is a cyberattack outside the theater of war allowed? Is taking out an extremist Web site a covert operation or a traditional military activity? Should Congress be informed?

“The point of the story is it hasn’t been sorted out yet in a way that all the persons involved in cyber-operations have a clear understanding of doctrine, legal authorities and policy, and a clear understanding of the distinction between what is considered intelligence activity and wartime [Defense Department] authority,” said one former senior national security official.

CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “It’s sheer lunacy to suggest that any part of our government would do anything to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters to Iraq.” [Note that this is NOT a denial. - LG]

The Pentagon, the Justice Department and the National Security Agency, whose director oversaw the operation to take down the site, declined to comment for this story, as did officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington…

Continue reading.

Take a look.

Lee Fang at ThinkProgress:

Republican lawmakers, as well as Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), have falsely claimed that the health reform bill allows taxpayer funded abortions. At a press conference yesterday, GOP members of Congress convened to again hammer the lie home that health reform will provide taxpayer funds for abortion.

Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA), a member of the GOP leadership team at the press event yesterday, blasted Democrats for trying to pass a health reform bill with supposed funds for abortion coverage. ThinkProgress spoke to McMorris-Rodgers after the event. According to disclosure reports, McMorris-Rodgers’ state Republican Party provides health insurance through AWB Health Choice — a consortium of benefit packages including Lifewise Health Plans of Washington, which covers abortions. McMorris-Rodgers assailed the nonexistent abortion coverage in the health reform bill, while brushing aside her own campaign dollars going towards plans which cover abortion. Eventually, the congresswoman relented and admitted that her campaign dollars funding abortion coverage is “not” okay:

TP: But at the same time, Lifewise Health Plans, which is what the Washington State GOP uses to provide health insurance to their employees, they cover abortion. So when you fundraise for the Washington State GOP, aren’t you providing dollars to abortion?

MCMORRIS-RODGERS: Uh, we’re talking about federal taxpayer dollars.

TP: Yeah, but isn’t this kind of like, you know, “do as I say, but not what I do?”

MCMORRIS-RODGERS: Um, I think the issue at hand is whether or not federal taxpayer dollars should be used to fund abortion –

TP: But your fundraiser dollars are used for abortions. … But campaign dollars are okay, Republican campaign dollars that you raise?

MCMORRIS-RODGERS: No, that’s not.

Listen here:

McMorris-Rodger’s initial indifference to her own state party funding abortion coverage reveals the partisanship of her ploy to lie about the health bill and claim that it covers abortions. Like McMorris-Rodgers, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Newt Gingrich have health insurance plans for their campaign employees which provide abortion coverage. And until recently, even the staunchly anti-choice Republican National Committee provided abortion coverage to its employees.

The Catholic Health Association and a group of 59,000 Catholic nuns recently endorsed health reform, noting that the bill in Congress does not provide taxpayer funded abortions. Additionally, T.R. Reid, writing in the Washington Post this week, explained why anti-abortion activists should support health reform. “Increasing health-care coverage is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the number of abortions — a fact proved by years of experience in other industrialized nations.” Regardless, partisan hypocrites like McMorris-Rodgers are plowing ahead, hoping to exploit a polarizing issue to kill reform.

Mistermix at Balloon Juice:

Debbie Schlussel’s report [and read the report: lots of details - LG] that Sean Hannity’s charity is a scam—it donated less than 4% of its take to the wounded vets it purports to support—is being picked up by “reasonable” conservatives.  Frum, for example, wonders if other conservatives will even mention that Sean likes to fly to those events in private jets, and charters a fleet of luxury SUVs for transporting his entourage.   Sully calls that “a poignant question”.

I’ve got a touching question, one which may be a bit unreasonable, given the ruthless self-examination on display here:

Where the fuck were these guys when a Kos diarist outed Hannity’s charity, or when the Washington Post reported that most of these charities were scams, in 2007?

Update: The head of the foundation, Ollie North, issued a press release [pdf], denying everything.  The Post story is based on a 2007 report by the American Institute for Philanthropy.  They gave Freedom Alliance, the charity Hannity was pimping, an “F”.   AIP is a membership-only organization that charges for its guide, so I can’t see what it was rated more recently.

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum enlisted some interns this week to survey Tea Party activists protesting in D.C. earlier this week. The goal was to get a sense of the activists’ understanding of taxes — ostensibly, the "movement’s" raison d’être — and factual knowledge.

Bruce Bartlett reported today on the survey’s results, and found that for an anti-tax group, "they don’t know much about taxes."

Indeed, it appears much of the Tea Party crowd is simply clueless about the issues they claim to care the most about, wildly exaggerating federal tax rates, how much a median family pays in taxes, and what’s changed since President Obama took office.

In short, no matter how one slices the data, the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family.

Tea Partyers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today, and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.

As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president…. No taxpayer anywhere in the country had his or her taxes increased as a consequence of Obama’s policies.

There were no questions in the survey about health care policy, but it stands to reason that these same folks are basing their opposition to the Democratic plan based on little more than confusion.

Bruce added that "it’s a bad idea for so many participants to operate on the basis of false notions." It is, indeed. We’re talking about a reasonably large group of people who seem to have no idea what they’re talking about, revel in their own ignorance, and nevertheless seek an active role in the process.

Making matters worse, this is also a group that seems to actively eschew reality, deliberately rejecting the truth because facts are perceived as having a liberal bias. As John Cole recently noted, "It really is quite amazing what you can do with a group of people who are completely uninterested in the truth, unwilling to believe anything that comes from someone other than Rush or Glenn Beck or an ‘acceptable’ source of information, and who have a vested interest in believing what they want to believe, reality be damned."

Following up on an item from last month, this is important to the extent that there are still some who believe the political mainstream should do more to listen to the Tea Party crowd and take its hysterical cries seriously. But how can credible people take nonsense seriously and hope to come up with a meaningful result? How can policymakers actually address substantive challenges while following the advice of angry mobs who reject reason and evidence?

The bottom line seem inescapable: Tea Party activists have no idea what they’re talking about. Their sincerity notwithstanding, this is a confused group of misled people.

Steve Benen has a good post at Political Animal:

It’s probably an esoteric point, but it’s worth pausing to appreciate just how ridiculously challenging it was to craft this health care reform proposal. There’s a very good reason this legislation has never passed up until now, and why presidents who’ve tried have failed, and it goes beyond just right-wing hysterics and corporate pushback.

Think about the scope of the task — Democrats were told they needed a health care reform bill that spends a lot of money on covering the uninsured, lowers the deficit, strengthens Medicare, helps businesses, eases government budgets, protects consumers, and controls costs, all at the same time. It would also need to earn the blessing of Congressional Budget Office, the American Medical Association, the AARP, and the nation’s largest labor unions.

Democrats were also told they needed to do all of this in the face of unanimous and apoplectic Republican opposition, far-right manipulation of gullible conservative activists, and media coverage that largely ignores the substance of the bill while pretending every right-wing attack deserves attention.

This is a needle that’s almost impossible to thread. And yet, that’s exactly what the White House and congressional leaders have done. It’s no small feat.

But it might yet fail anyway, in part because some Dems prefer cowardice to success. Ezra Klein does a nice job setting up the substantive dilemma facing Democratic lawmakers who are thinking about siding with far-right Republicans to kill the legislation.

If you’re a liberal House Democrat, here’s what you’d be voting against: Legislation that covers 32 million people. A world in which 95 percent of all non-elderly, legal residents have health-care coverage. An end to insurers rescinding coverage for the sick, or discriminating based on preexisting conditions, or spending 30 cents of each premium dollar on things that aren’t medical care. Exchanges where insurers who want to jack up premiums will have to publicly explain their reason, where regulators will be able to toss them out based on bad behavior, and where consumers will be able to publicly rate them. Hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to help lower-income Americans afford health-care insurance. The final closure of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit’s "doughnut hole."

If you’re a conservative House Democrat, then probably you support many of those policies, too. But you also get the single most ambitious effort the government has ever made to control costs in the health-care sector.

Greg Sargent added, "The House Dem leadership’s game plan all along has been to tell wavering conservative Democrats who voted No last time that they have now gotten their way — a bill with no public option, a bill with stronger cost controls, a bill that’s more fiscally responsible, etc."

In a divided Democratic caucus, featuring liberals and conservative Blue Dogs, the trick was to find a way to deliver on what both contingents wanted to see in a reform bill. As impossible as this seemed, the final Democratic reform proposal does just that.

I have no idea what’s going to happen when the final roll call is held, but Democrats have no reason, no excuse, no coherent rationale for killing the best chance the United States has ever had to pass health care reform.

The latest I’ve seen is this post by Lee Fang at ThinkProgress, in which Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) states:

If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

I understand that the South’s educational system is weak, but surely even Broun should now that the "aggression" of the Civil War was on the Southern side: It was the South who opened the Civil War with an attack on Ft. Sumter. But then, the South has always been a poor loser and constantly trying to weasel away from their actions.

Good editorial:

Congress, and its Catholics, should say yes to health care reform.

We do not reach this conclusion as easily as one might think, given the fact that we have supported universal health care for decades, as have the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Health Association and other official and non-official organs of the Catholic church. There are, to be sure, grave problems with the bill the House will consider in the next few days. It maintains the squirrelly system of employer-based health care coverage that impedes cost reduction. Its treatment of undocumented workers is shameful. It is unnecessarily complicated, even Byzantine, in some of its provisions. It falls short of providing true universal coverage.

Nonetheless, the choice Congress faces is between the status quo and change — and the current bill is a profoundly preferable step in the direction of positive change. The legislation will lower costs, not only for individuals and small businesses currently burdened by rising premiums, but for the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which threaten to strangle the federal budget. It will extend health care coverage to 30 million Americans who currently lack it. Finally, a society that covers most of its citizens will be a society more likely to eventually cover everyone — our immigrant brothers and sisters included.

Much of the focus on the bill in these last days, and not only in the Catholic world, has been on its provisions regarding abortion. All sides agreed to abide by the spirit of the Hyde Amendment, which for more than 30 years has banned federal funding of abortion. But the Hyde Amendment applies to government programs only, and trying to fit its stipulations to a private insurance marketplace is a bit like putting a potato skin on an apple. Pro-choice advocates could not understand why a government that currently subsidizes abortion coverage through the tax code should balk at subsidizing private plans that cover abortion in the insurance exchanges the bill establishes. They have a point. Pro-life groups understandably worry that opening the door to federal funding of abortion, even indirectly, risks further encroachments on Hyde. They have a point, too.

This being a political debate, it was bound to get nasty. And nasty it has gotten. The Catholic Health Association and its leadership is taking heat for their courageous stance in favor of the bill; the nearly 60,000 women religious who endorsed the measure yesterday, even as their congregations face scrutiny from Rome on other matters, should be applauded.

While we acknowledge the thoughtful tone of the statement by Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, some of his confreres have taken it upon themselves to impugn CHA’s motives, the competence of its leadership, or both…

Continue reading.

Mark Benjamin in Salon.com, in an article I blogged earlier:

… These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects, using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The CIA’s waterboarding was "different" from training for elite soldiers, according to the Justice Department document released last month. "The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed," the document notes. In soldier training, "The interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier’s face) in a controlled manner," DOJ wrote. "By contrast, the agency interrogator … continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose."

One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood. Generally a concern only for marathon runners , who on extremely rare occasions drink that much water, hyponatremia could set in during a prolonged waterboarding session. A waterlogged, sodium-deprived prisoner might become confused and lethargic, slip into convulsions, enter a coma and die.

Therefore, "based on advice of medical personnel," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote in a May 10, 2005, memo authorizing continued use of waterboarding, "the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia."

The agency used so much water there was also another risk: pneumonia resulting from detainees inhaling the fluid forced into their mouths and noses. Saline, the CIA argued, might reduce the risk of pneumonia when this occurred.

"The detainee might aspirate some of the water, and the resulting water in the lungs might lead to pneumonia," Bradbury noted in the same memo. "To mitigate this risk, a potable saline solution is used in the procedure."

That particular Bradbury memo laid out a precise and disturbing protocol for what went on in each waterboarding session. The CIA used a "specially designed" gurney for waterboarding, Bradbury wrote. After immobilizing a prisoner by strapping him down, interrogators then tilted the gurney to a 10-15 degree downward angle, with the detainee’s head at the lower end. They put a black cloth over his face and poured water, or saline, from a height of 6 to 18 inches, documents show. The slant of the gurney helped drive the water more directly into the prisoner’s nose and mouth. But the gurney could also be tilted upright quickly, in the event the prisoner stopped breathing…

Nice that these lawyers were considered blameless. There were not, and they are scum.

Of course, Obama believes that we should forget about all this. Obama has a real problem somewhere in his morality.

Conor Friedersdorf has some good posts on a bad person:

The Spurious Slurs of Andy McCarthy

Keep America Safe Cannot Be Persuasively Defended

Hardly a Straw Man

Innocent man helped by Gitmo Attorney: the case Liz Cheney doesn’t want you to read about (I blogged this one already)

I rather like moss, so I was interested to read this tip in a copy of Sunset magazine I found in the waiting room: Scrape off some moss you like and find growing someplace—about a handful—and then put that into a blender along with 1 c. buttermilk. Blend, then paint the resulting sludge where you want the moss to grow—on a rock or a sundial or the ground, anyplace that’s damp and shaded.

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

Insurance giant WellPoint Inc. — the company planning double-digit rate hikes for customers — made a compelling promise a few years ago. Shortly after Democrats reclaimed the congressional majority, the insurer announced that it would use its charitable foundation to invest $30 million over three years as part of a "comprehensive plan to help address the growing ranks of the uninsured."

That was three years ago. How’s that promise working out? Not especially well.

[A]ccording to tax filings, company promotional material and former executives familiar with the initiative, WellPoint never came close to fulfilling that pledge. [...]

However, WellPoint’s public records indicate that from 2007 to 2009 the foundation gave less than $6.2 million in grants targeted specifically at helping uninsured Americans get access to coverage and care — barely one-fifth of what was promised and just 11% of the charity’s total giving over the last three years.

"It was just not something that the company really wanted to do," said one former executive, who, like others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified out of concern that discussing WellPoint could have adverse career consequences. "So it went by the wayside."

A company spokesperson said the company fulfilled its pledge, despite evidence to the contrary. Asked for an explanation the spokesperson said the reporting process is "complicated," but as the LATimes added, "she declined to provide details."

Keep in mind, it’s not that WellPoint was hurting for cash — it’s enjoyed steady profits over the three-year period — it’s just that it apparently didn’t feel like helping the uninsured as much as it pledged to.

Kevin Drum asked some reasonable questions: "Why bother reneging on this promise? Are they trying to confirm that they’re the scumbags everyone thinks they are? Or did they just not figure that anyone would ever follow up on this?"

This doesn’t have to be an either/or situation.

Businesses don’t care whom they hurt so long as they can settle cheaply.

Via Ed Brayton, this post by Conor Friedersdorf:

Every so often, 42-year-old Fouad al-Rabiah took leave from his four kids and a longtime desk job at Kuwait Airways to help those less fortunate than him. In 1994 he did relief work in Bosnia. He spent part of 1998 working with the Red Cross in Kosovo. In 2000 he flew to Bangladesh, where he helped deliver dialysis fluid to hospitals. And in 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan, intending to provide humanitarian relief when he wound up in the custody of the United States military. In that chaotic year, our troops came across lots of foreigners in Afghanistan, some of them traveling abroad for entirely innocent reasons, others engaged in jihad against the American war effort.

It took until the summer of 2002 for Mr. al-Rabiah to be visited by a CIA analyst and Arabic expert. “He wasn’t a jihadi, but I told him he should have been arrested for stupidity,” the CIA agent told New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer in an interview. Ms. Mayer’s book The Dark Side goes on to explain that two National Security Council staffers — senior terrorism expert General John Gordon, and legal adviser John Bellinger — sought to brief President Bush about reports that an innocent man was being held at Guantanamo Bay. Before they could reach President Bush, however, they were intercepted by David Addington, legal counsel to vice-president Dick Cheney, who said, “No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it!”

It is worth revisiting Mr. al-Rabiah’s case as America debates whether lawyers who did pro-bono work for Gitmo detainees deserve praise or scorn. Liz Cheney, William Kristol, Marc Thiessen, and Andrew McCarthy are among the folks who argue the latter — all either helped air or defended a television advertisement calling the subset of these lawyers who now work in the Obama Justice Department “the al Qaeda seven.” In the New York Times, Mr. McCarthy wrote, “Only criminal defendants are entitled to counsel, and those who represent them do indeed perform a constitutionally valuable function. It has never been the law, however, that war prisoners are entitled to counsel to challenge their detention as enemy combatants.” He goes on to assert that “the lawyers chose to offer themselves, gratis, to our enemies for litigation the Constitution does not require. They did so knowing that this litigation would be harmful to the war effort.”

Orin Kerr, a law professor who blogs at The Volokh Conspiracy, has published a devastating take-down of Mr. McCarthy’s argument. It is worth reading in full. I’ll excerpt just one sentence: “McCarthy strangely overlooks the basic fact that much of the litigation for the Guantanamo detainees concerns whether they are in fact the enemy.” Even as an abstract argument, Professor Kerr’s point is persuasive, as are all parts of his rebuttal. But the wrongheadedness of the Cheney/Kristol/Thiessen/McCarthy view can be fully appreciated only by looking at how it played out in a particular case.

Thus Mr. al-Rabiah. It isn’t just that he was an innocent man thrown into Gitmo, or that he was held even after a CIA analyst concluded that he was innocent, or that National Security Council Staffers were aware of his innocence and actively trying to bring about a review of his detention — Mr. al-Rabiah’s case is apt because after the CIA’s 2002 determination of his innocence, he spent another seven years wrongly imprisoned, regaining his freedom and seeing his children only after retaining the help of American attorneys…

Continue reading. The US: the nation where, if you are innocent, you can be locked up for 7 years and occasionally tortured.

Very interesting post, with videos of the interview. Via Ed Brayton, who also has the videos. The article at the first link begins:

Lewis calls the Goldman Sachs-AIG deal one of the original sins of the looming financial crisis. Other Wall Street firms were so jealous of the Goldman deal they got AIG to insure another $30 billion of what turned out to be worthless securities. But Lewis thinks the fiasco had more to do with Wall Street stupidity than corruption.

He said Wall Street didn’t understand these things "well enough."

"I mean, there’s a wonderful little vignette in the ‘Big Short’ about the leading bond trade, subprime mortgage bond trader at Morgan Stanley, a fellow named Howie Hubler, who manages to lose somewhere between, it’s hard to know, but seven and $12 billion in a matter of six or eight months, more than any single trader has ever lost in the history of Wall Street, and no one knows his name," Lewis said.

According to Lewis, at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, when the commercial bank J.P. Morgan became the first to recognize the danger and fled the subprime market, Hubler was gobbling up $16 billion worth of subprime mortgage bonds that would be worthless in nine months.

"He did not understand the forces that work in his own market. And he was supposed to be the smart guy. I mean, what were the dumb guys doing? So, I think that it’s really clear that the firms themselves did not understand the machine they created," Lewis said.

Asked what happened to Hubler, Lewis said, "He’s allowed to resign from Morgan Stanley and he takes with him millions of dollars in back pay, tens of millions of dollars in back pay; it was all hushed up, basically."

According to Lewis, "all" of the people who made these terrible decisions left with a lot of money. "I didn’t run across a single character who didn’t get rich. Anybody above a certain level in all these firms made huge sums of money by any standard. And the people who were, I mean, this is where it gets a little creepy, the people who were most instrumental in building the subprime mortgage machine also happened to be the ones who had the most detailed understanding now of the securities in the rubble," he told Kroft.

"And they’re being paid all over again to sort through the mess because they’re the experts. That is an age-old trick on Wall Street, ’cause generally speaking, people who create disasters make a lotta money cleaning up the disaster because they’re the ones who know about the disaster," he added.

What about the CEOs? …

Continue reading. How can anyone believe that businesses care about anything other than making money by doing whatever it takes, regardless of morals, ethics, the law, or common sense.

Obama is good on some things (healthcare reform) and absolutely terrible on others (civil rights of the accused). Ed Brayton takes a look at Obama’s latest atrocity:

And yet another example of Obama morphing into George W. Bush. Now he’s threatening to veto a bill that provides for more congressional oversight of intelligence operations.

President Obama will veto a major intelligence funding bill unless lawmakers remove provisions that would toughen congressional oversight of spy agencies and require more stringent congressional notification of intelligence activities.

Three sections of the bill are of "serious concern to the intelligence community," OMB Director Peter Orszag wrote to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Vice Chairman Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Calif.) and ranking member Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.). The three sections are "so serious that the president’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill if they are included."

Presidents have always hated congressional oversight of anything the executive branch does, but improvements in that oversight has always followed periods of the most flagrant and unconstitutional abuses of power by the executive branch. It happened in the mid to late 70s after the Church Committee revealed a whole range of covert CIA actions to overthrow governments, illegal FBI surveillance through COINTELPRO and other programs and so forth.

Now Congress is trying to assert more authority over intelligence operations in the wake of the Bush administration’s use of torture, extraordinary rendition and warrantless wiretaps. And Obama is on the wrong side yet again. What side is that? Pete Hoekstra’s side:

"The Democrats just can’t seem to get on the same page when it comes to addressing the national security threats facing our nation," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.), the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. "The issues that continue to dog this flawed intelligence bill raise serious questions about the Democrats’ handling of critical national security issues."

If you’re a Democrat and you find yourself arguing for less transparency and less oversight and agreeing with Pete Hoekstra, it’s probably time to rethink your position. But as usual, Obama is more interested in protecting his own power than in doing the right thing.

I would love it if the US elected a good president, but that requires that the political structure not be broken, and broken it is.