At least toward foreign visitors. Look at this story by Nina Berstein in the NY Times:
He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse [the new America, under Bush; lucky he wasn't tortured as well. - LG] while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Legal commentators have argued for years about whether there might ever be legitimate trials for the so-called “enemy combatants” we’re holding at Guantanamo Bay. Some say no. Others, like our friend Ben Wittes, argue that the evidence is inconclusive. They want to see what the Guantanamo military commissions produce before pronouncing them a failure.
We may never get there. Key actors are declining to play their part in a piece of theater designed to produce all convictions all the time. These refusals, affecting two trials this week, suggest that the whole apparatus—seven years and counting in the making—cannot ever be fixed. The trials are doomed, and they are doomed from the inside out.
Today we learned that the Pentagon has dropped charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani—the alleged 20th hijacker (or maybe the 21st or 22nd, since that title has gone to others before him). Along with five other “high value” detainees, al-Qahtani was facing capital charges at Guantanamo. The decision not to try him comes from the convening authority for the commissions, Susan Crawford. She didn’t give an explanation for halting the prosecution, but, then, we don’t really need one. As Phillip Carter notes elsewhere in Slate, it’s been clear for a while that the evidence against al-Qahtani was torture (or near-torture) tainted, and prosecutors at Guantanamo had announced long ago that “what had been done to him would prevent him from ever being put on trial.” In light of all that, you might wonder why he was one of the six trotted out for the big show trials in the first place.
Responding to the California Supreme Court’s decision yesterday overturning the state’s ban on gay marriage, congressional conservatives attacked the decision by calling it the result of “unelected judges” turning over the will of the people.
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the House Minority Whip, charged in a statement that “unelected judges” are trying to “substitute their own worldview for the wisdom of the American people”:
Today, the decision of unelected judges to overturn the will of the people of California on the question of same-sex marriage demonstrates the lengths that unelected judges will go to substitute their own worldview for the wisdom of the American people.
But, in making their rush to judgment about the CA decision, both Blunt and Feeney have the basic facts wrong about how California’s judicial system works. SmartVoter.org, a resource of the League of Women’s Voters, makes clear that California’s Supreme Court justices are “confirmed by the public at the next general election” after being appointed and “justices also come before voters at the end of their 12-year terms.”
In fact, each of the seven justices involved in yesterday’s decision were approved by California voters by overwhelming margins:
- Justice Joyce L. Kennard confirmed in 2006 with 74.5% of the vote.
- Justice Carol A. Corrigan confirmed in 2006 with 74.4% of the vote.
- Justice Kathryn M. Werdegar confirmed in 2002 with 74.1% of the vote.
- Justice Carlos R. Moreno confirmed in 2002 with 72.6% of the vote.
- Justice Marvin R. Baxter confirmed in 2002 with 71.5% of the vote.
- Justice Ronald M. George confirmed in 1998 with 75.5% of the vote.
- Justice Ming William Chin confirmed in 1998 with 69.3% of the vote.
The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder notes that Feeney’s statement on the decision also engages in “coded gay baiting” when he informs “Florida’s hardworking families” that he “will continue to fight to prevent San Francisco taxes and values from infiltrating our community.”
My God, the EPA is a totally different animal under Bush. Paul Kiel reports in TPMmuckraker:
For those who’ve been watching the Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration, you’re familiar with the following pattern: the EPA, over the objection of its own scientists, issues a new rule that weakens environmental controls, but when pressed for an explanation, EPA officials explain that the new rule has nothing to do with easing the restrictions on polluters. No — the change is merely a clarification, or a technical fix to some nonsense bureaucratic rule, or the inescapable conclusion drawn from a sober appraisal of the law.
And here we go again. Here’s the rule change (note the dissent from EPA scientists):
The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to “Class 1 areas,” federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation’s most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia’s Shenandoah, Colorado’s Mesa Verde and North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt national parks.
And here is the explanation — from a former EPA official who has departed to head the the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani (yes, that Giuliani) no less:
Jeffrey R. Holmstead… helped initiate the rule change while heading the EPA’s air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that the EPA’s scientific staff was taking “the most conservative approach” in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.”The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur in the real world?” Holmstead said in an interview Thursday. “This has to do with what [modeling] assumptions you’re required to do. This is really a legal issue and a policy issue.”
The new rule changes how pollution levels in parks are measured — instead of frequent measures, the new rule “would average the levels over a year so that spikes in pollution levels would not violate the law.” Just a common sense fix, you might say. But as one environmental advocate explains, “It’s like if you’re pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, ‘If you look at how I’ve driven all year, I’ve averaged 55 miles per hour.’”
It looks like the EPA is really competing to not only be the most politicized of the agencies in the Bush Administration, but also to create the most lasting damage.
Bush’s position—that just talking to enemies is appeasement (it’s not: giving them things of value is appeasement)—is one not shared by McCain—or at least wasn’t share by McCain until the old Straight-Talker did one of his numerous flip-flops. A while back (via TalkingPointsMemo):
VoteVets.org and CREW released an e-mail today that reveals “a Veterans Affairs (VA) employee directing VA staff to refrain from diagnosing soldiers and veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).” The e-mail, dated May 1, 2008, complains about “compensation seeking veterans” and urges VA staff to rule out PTSD and “consider a diagnosis of ‘Adjustment Disorder’” instead:
Last month, RAND released a study showing that nearly 20% of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — nearly 300,000 in all — “report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”
The Bush FDA continues it new role of protecting businesses. Brian Clark Howard posts on The Daily Green:
The controversy over the safety of the chemical bisphenol A continues, as the U.S. FDA issues a statement saying that the agency sees no reason to tell consumers to stop using products that contain it, Reuters reports. This includes polycarbonate baby bottles, water bottles and more (which should be labeled with the #7 recycling code).
The FDA’s statement, released in a climate of heavy pressure from the chemical industry, is in contrast to developments in Canada. On April 19 the Canadian government began a 60-day public comment period on whether polycarbonate baby bottles should be banned in the country. Observers have said a comprehensive ban on polycarbonate is even possible up north in the near future.
For its part, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., makers of Nalgene bottles, have announced that they will stop using polycarbonate. Wal-Mart says it expects all baby bottles it carries to be free of the material by early next year, and Toys R Us has discussed a similar plan.
If such major players are clearly expressing concern over BPA, what legs does the FDA have to stand on for its reassurance? According to Reuters, the FDA’s associate commissioner for science, Norris Alderson, said the feds are reviewing safety concerns, and pointed to two industry-funded studies claiming it poses no risk.
The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained previously withheld documents from the Defense Department, including internal investigations into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody overseas. Uncensored documents released as a result of the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit shed light on the deaths of detainees in Iraq and internal disagreement within the military over harsh interrogation practices used at Guantánamo Bay.
“These documents provide further evidence that the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad was not aberrational, but was widespread and systemic,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU. “They only underscore the need for an independent investigation into high-level responsibility for prisoner abuse.”
One of the documents released to the ACLU is a list of at least four prisoner deaths that were the subject of Navy Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) investigations. The NCIS document contains new information about the deaths of some of these prisoners, including details about Farhad Mohamed, who had contusions under his eyes and the bottom of his chin, a swollen nose, cuts and large bumps on his forehead when he died in Mosul in 2004. The document also includes details about Naem Sadoon Hatab, a 52-year-old Iraqi man who was strangled to death at the Whitehorse detainment facility in Nasiriyah in June 2003; the shooting death of Hemdan El Gashame in Nasiriyah in March 2003; and the death of Manadel Jamadi during an interrogation after his head was beaten with a stove at Abu Ghraib in November 2003.
They also got new information about Guantanamo:
Another document obtained by the ACLU provides further context to objections raised by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) about the use of harsh interrogation methods applied on Guantánamo prisoners. The memo prepared for CITF commander Brittain Mallow appears to have been drafted for September 2002, and identifies “unacceptable methods” involving “threats,” “discomfort,” and “sensory deprivation,” while also providing guidance to CITF agents on permissible interrogation methods for use on detainees. The memo suggests that CITF expressed disapproval of abusive methods used at Guantánamo as far back as September 2002. In December 2002, Mallow instructed his unit not to participate in “any questionable” interrogation techniques at the facility.
Look at that timeline: September 2002. That’s before U.S. Army officials asked the Office of the Secretary of Defense for guidance on increasing the brutality of Guantanamo interrogations. There is so much more that has yet to be revealed.
Mike Lillis has a pair of complementary stories in the Washington Independent that offer some good news. The first—which is excellent and deserves a full reading—describes how the Blue Dog (conservative) Democrats refuse to support Webb’s GI Bill unless funding can be found. The second article, posted later, tells how Pelosi and the Blue Dogs have reached agreement and the Bill can go forward:
Conservative Democrats and party leaders in the House will propose a millionaires tax to fund a popular proposal to expand education benefits to post-9/11 vets, The Associated Press reports today. The conservative “Blue Dog” members support the concept of a more generous GI Bill, but balked at the $51.8 billion cost, which Democratic leaders wanted to ignore by sticking the proposal to an emergency war spending bill. The Blue Dogs said they would withdraw their support for the GI Bill provision unless it was paid for — a conflict that’s delayed debate on the spending bill until Thursday, at the earliest.
Under the new plan, individuals earning over $500,000 and couples earning over $1 million a year would get slapped with a half-percent tax surcharge. The AP quotes Blue Dog Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark) with the following:
What we’re talking about is a one-half percent income tax surcharge on incomes above $1 million. So someone who earns $2 million a year would pay $5,000. … They’re not going to miss it.
Not that the proposal will get very far. Though the GI Bill enjoys significant bipartisan support in the Senate, there’s no indication that the tax-hike offset would keep enough Republicans on board to pass the upper chamber. On top of that, President George W. Bush has vowed to veto any tax increase that hits his desk.
But paying for the GI Bill will do is this: It will get the Blue Dogs on board, allowing the proposal to pass the House (which requires just a simple majority), and forcing GOP senators to make a tough election year choice: Do they vote for the tax hike or against the veterans benefit? We could know as early as next week.
And does the GOP care? (The answer to the second question is definitely “No”.) ThinkProgress:
After years of delay, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne finally declared the polar bear a “threatened species,” under the Endangered Species Act, due to global warming. Yet at the same time, Kempthorne also decreed that drilling in the Arctic can still continue:
This rule, effective immediately, will ensure the protection of the bear while allowing us to continue to develop our natural resources in the arctic region in an environmentally sound way.
It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself.
This is in the context of the US making Iran a terrible, implacable foe, despite the fact that (as Greenwald points out) “it’s a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and could not possibly threaten us.”
The AP reports today that the Pentagon has “dropped charges” against Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 who was alleged to have been the so-called “20th hijacker” on 9/11.
Known as Detainee 063, Qahtani was the subject of a 2002 meeting at Guantanamo that included former Bush lawyer Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s lawyer David Addington, and former Rumsfeld lawyer Jim Haynes. The trio approved the interrogations at Guantanamo, with Donald Rumsfeld then authorizing the “First Special Interrogation Plan” specifically for Qahtani. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) noted that these methods included:
[F]orty-eight days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory overstimulation, and threats with military dogs. The aggressive techniques, standing alone and in combination, resulted in severe physical and mental pain and suffering.
“This is a very dangerous individual who has provided us with valuable intelligence,” claimed former White House press secretary Scott McClellan in 2005. But as Marcy Wheeler notes, the dismissal raises questions about the credibility of torture-based evidence.
Renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands, who has extensively studied Qahtani, talked to PBS’s Bill Moyers about the interrogations of Qahtani on Friday. “And the bottom line of it was, contrary to what the administration said, they got nothing out of him,” Sands explained. Watch it:
In 2006, Qahtani recanted a confession he said he made after he was tortured. In fact, “Qahtani never made a single statement that was not extracted through torture or the threat of torture,” CCR notes.
Records of the interrogations of Qahtani, however, were “mysteriously lost.” Cameras that “run 24 hours a day at the prison were set to automatically record over their contents,” the Guardian reported last month.
Well, well—those weapons made in Iran and given to Iraqi insurgents? They weren’t made in Iran after all. Take a look:
In a sharp reversal of its longstanding accusations against Iran arming militants in Iraq , the US military has made an unprecedented albeit quiet confession: the weapons they had recently found in Iraq were not made in Iran at all.
According to a report by the LA Times correspondent Tina Susman in Baghdad: “A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin. When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.”
This article by Tim Weiner in the NY Times is remarkable. It begins:
The wars of the 20th century destroyed many millions of people who once lived in the hillsides and valleys of remote rural worlds. Few were hit as hard as the Hmong, an ancient tribe whose members hewed out rough lives upcountry in Laos, west of Vietnam. Half a century ago, Laos became a cockpit of the cold war. The Hmong, led by a charismatic soldier named Vang Pao, sided with the United States in the fight against Communism in Southeast Asia. They lost everything — their land, their way of life, their country.
Now the war on terror has engulfed Vang Pao in his land of exile, California. It has given him cause to question his faith in America. Last year, the United States indicted the 78-year-old general as a terrorist, accusing him of plotting to overthrow the Communist government of Laos. His prosecutors painted him as a Laotian bin Laden; they said he conspired “to murder thousands and thousands of people.” In open court, they called the case a conspiracy as immense as the attacks of Sept. 11. Few former friends of American foreign interests have fallen further from favor in Washington’s eyes.
The case against Vang Pao grew out of a sting operation, a crime created in part by the government itself. What evidence there is rests largely on secretly recorded conversations led by an undercover federal agent, and while the transcripts implicating some of the co-defendants in the case seem damning, the agent barely met Vang Pao. The talk between them was brief; though Vang Pao may have dreamed aloud of a glorious revolution in Laos in years gone by, his role in the conspiracy charged by the government may be hard to prove. The government presents the case as a clear-cut gunrunning conspiracy in violation of the Neutrality Act, which outlaws military expeditions against nations with which the United States is at peace. But the old general’s defenders contend that the case against him is the consequence of a misguided post-9/11 zeal. If convicted in a trial, the former American ally could face the rest of his life in prison. And already his indictment has apparently emboldened Laotian and Thai authorities to crack down on the beleaguered Hmong who remain in refugee camps or in hiding in the jungles of Laos.
The president has said that his administration is employing every tool at their disposal to foil terrorists while protecting the civil liberties of Americans. For some reason, The Los Angeles Timesopted not to take him at his word.
The secrecy necessary for counterterrorism prosecutions has combined with the rampant secrecy of the Bush administration to make it all but impossible to measure that balance. But the Times chooses a method, however imperfect, to gauge what’s going on. Simply put: spying is up while counterterrorism prosecutions are down. The specifics:
A recent study showed that the number of terrorism and national security cases initiated by the Justice Department in 2007 was more than 50% below 2002 levels. The nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act, found that the number of cases brought declined 19% in the last year alone, dropping to 505 in 2007 from 624 in 2006.By contrast, the Justice Department reported last month that the nation’s spy court had granted 2,370 warrant requests by the department to search or eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and spies in the U.S. last year — 9% more than in 2006. The number of such warrants approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has more than doubled since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The department also reported a sharp rise in the use of national security letters by the FBI — from 9,254 in 2005 to 12,583 in 2006, the latest data available. The letters seek customer information from banks, Internet providers and phone companies.
And as the Times notes, the Justice Department’s performance in terrorism prosecutions has lately been underwhelming — to wit, the farcical Seas of David case, where two juries have failed to reach a verdict.
Amidst all the news items last week, I wanted to flag this brilliant article in the New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe on the al-Haramain case and the “state secrets” privilege. Keefe describes the way the case unfolded — starting with the government’s inadvertent disclosure of the fact that it was using its super-secret NSA surveillance program to eavesdrop on conversations between an alleged terrorist charity and its lawyers.
The al-Haramain foundation brought suit in federal court over the NSA surveillance program and the ways that program violated al-Haramain’s constitutional rights. So did many other plaintiffs, but al-Haramain was different because it had actual documentary proof of the fact that it had been surveilled. To get this challenge dismissed, the government deployed one of the most potent legal weapons in its arsenal: the “state secrets” privilege. Often described as the neutron bomb of litigation, the government invokes this privilege when it feels that continued litigation will threaten national security.
Justice Department lawyers asserted the privilege in this case, but there was a hiccup: The federal judge hearing the case didn’t want to summarily dismiss it. The government appealed to the 9th Circuit, which issued a somewhat disjointed opinion last fall excluding the secret proof of surveillance but allowing the case to proceed.
More than 40 cases are waiting in the 9th Circuit to be resolved, either at the district court or appellate level. To date, the Supreme Court has turned down appeals involving the state secrets privilege, but it’s not clear how long it can continue to do so given the monumental constitutional issues involved.
In his new book, Torture Team, renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands documents the fact that Bush’s torture program was approved at the highest levels of the administration.
Speaking with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday, Sands noted that these architects of torture refuse to acknowledge they were “complicit in the commission of a crime.” “There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility,” he said of his interviews with key torture advocates.
When you read my account with Doug Feith and with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Feith’s book. on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it’s as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it’s about individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject failure on that account.
Watch it:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently argued that torture is not unconstitutional. Speaking with Moyers, Sands slammed Scalia for being “foolish” and not considering the implications of his words:
I’ve listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there’s nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that?
“You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers,” Sands concluded.
Carol Rosenberg of the McClatchy Washington Bureau has a hopeful story:
In a rebuke, a military judge has disqualified a key Pentagon general from any role overseeing the Guantánamo trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver, saying he doubted the general’s impartiality in the case.
The judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, ordered the Pentagon’s general counsel to assign a new official to oversee the trial in place of Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W.Hartmann, the Defense Department’s legal adviser for military commissions.
The decision is a key one. In addition to overseeing the prosecution, Hartmann also had the power to decide how much would be spent on defense experts, travel and staff that might be need by Hamdan’s four-attorney legal team, including a staff psychiatrist.
Allred issued the 13-page ruling Friday, a little more than a week after lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 36, of Yemen, called witnesses to testify that during nearly a year as legal adviser Hartmann had pressured for swifter, more numerous prosecutions at the commissions.
Hamdan’s trial is presently slated to open June 2 as the first full U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II. Whether that schedule still holds is uncertain.
Allred wrote that he found ‘’substantial doubts” about Hartmann’s independence from Hamdan’s prosecutors, in part ”based on the length and intensity of the Legal Advisor’s involvement with the prosecution in general, as well the impact of his actions” in Hamdan’s case.
The driver, the Navy captain wrote, should be assured “fair and objective advice to which he is entitled during the balance of this case.”
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