Month: June 2008

End Of Guantanamo, Beginning Of The Search For Justice

by dday

The whole point of the Guantanamo prison was to create a space not on US soil that the Administration could make the case was not subject to the auspices of US law. As emptywheel notes, that is now inoperative. The SCOTUS ruling stating that prisoners at Gitmo have habeas rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention eliminates any need for the prison compound.

The deciding issues for Gitmo are that the US has control over the territory of the Gitmo base, as well as complete control of the detainees. The ruling, Gutierrez said, left open that Habeas would apply to detainees held elsewhere, but does not do that explicitly. The CCR attorneys on the call did say that the ruling prevented the government from creating “law-free zones” in which they rule, but without the rule of law.

There’s still a lot that’s up in the air, like where these habeas hearings would be heard and how the government will react (maybe by starting massive usage of military commissions to charge prisoners), but the ruling on Guantanamo is clear. It’s unnnecessary.

Sadly, that revelation comes too late for most of those held there.

Over two-thirds of the detainees in the Guantanamo Bay prison are suffering from or at risk of mental problems because they are kept isolated in small cells with little light or fresh air, according to Human Rights Watch.

In a report entitled “Locked Up Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantanamo,” the group says 185 of the 270 detainees at the U.S. military prison for terrorism suspects are housed in facilities similar to “supermax” prisons.

They spend 22 hours alone in cramped cells, have very limited contact with other human beings and are given little more than the Koran to occupy themselves, said the report, which is based interviews with government officials and attorneys.

Detainees held in this manner include many that have not been charged with crimes and have already been cleared for release or transfer, according to the report.

There’s also a report out today of an inmate at Guantanamo being tortured with a knife.

The U.S. government has photographic evidence that a Guantanamo Bay inmate was tortured with a knife after being taken to Morocco by U.S. forces, a British human rights group said Tuesday.

Reprieve said their client, Binyam Mohamed, had his genitals slashed repeatedly with a doctor’s scalpel while in custody in Morocco after he was flown there from Pakistan by American officials in 2002. It also said his U.S. captors later took pictures of the abuse to show authorities that his wounds were healing.

It’s really not enough to mount a campaign to end the practice of torture in a future Administration, although that is of course important. There needs to be continued investigations into how this started and who was responsible, and those responsible absolutely must be brought to justice. John Ashcroft, John Yoo, William Haynes, David Addington and Doug Feith all will be sitting before Congressional committees in the next few weeks. Whether it’s through the appointment of a special counsel in an Obama Administration, or tracking down anyone involved with authorizing torture when they go abroad and can be charged under international war crimes statutes, justice must out. A truth and reconciliation commission is the best method, but whatever the case, those who betrayed American values and shamed themselves through their actions cannot be allowed to drift free, only to crop up in some successive Republican White House. As Richard Clarke put it:

I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let – – pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 American dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded. And they will carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.

UPDATE: In a stunning reversal, Bush has said he will abide by the court’s ruling. He added, in his inimitable temper-tantrum way, “That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.” There’s also a suggestion of “new legislation to protect the American people.” Let’s sit back and see if the Democratic leadership gets fooled again.

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Where It Stops Nobody Knows

by digby

This is so bad on so many levels:

Apparently Malkin is back on Fox and will be one of their point people on Michelle Obama insults and smears. It’s one of the patented moves: employ one woman to publicly destroy another. I think it gives them a thrill up their legs.

By the way, if you don’t know, while “Baby Mama” is the name of a recent comedy about surrogate motherhood, the term comes from urban black culture and means unwed mother. It’s really one step above calling Michelle a nappy headed ho. But then, that’s the point.

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SCOTUS Throws A Life Preserver To The Rule Of Law

by dday

I gotta say, I didn’t expect this to happen:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

The justices handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The vote was 5-4, with the court’s liberal justices in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

If it weren’t for Anthony Kennedy or any of the more liberal justices, of course, that would no longer be true. Which is yet another reason why this election is so vital. Check out this quote from the Chief Justice. It reads like a comment at RedState:

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”

This action that has now been ruled invalid, the decision that Guantanamo detainees had no legal rights under the Constitution or Geneva, was the original sin that led to all the other abuses. And it won’t surprise anyone to learn that it was “the stupidest fucking guy on the planet” Doug Feith’s idea. In his book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, which is excerpted in this much-discussed Vanity Fair article, Philippe Sands talks to Feith, who’s proud of his achievement of getting the Administration to agree that detainees had no rights:

He was keen to talk about his role as the architect of President Bush’s decision of February 7, 2002. He didn’t buy the argument that the decision had the effect of casting the detainees into a great legal black hole. On the contrary, the President’s decision was actually a strike for the Geneva Conventions and for international law. “This was something I played a major role in,” he said with pride […]

In late January 2002 Feith and (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard) Myers went to meet Rumsfeld to talk about Geneva. Before they got to Rumsfeld’s office, Myers turned to him. With fire in his eyes he said: “We have to support the Geneva Conventions… if Rumsfeld doesn’t go along with this, I’m going to contradict them in front of the President.” Feith was amazed. It was an unusually tough statement, and the reference to the Secretary as “Rumsfeld” was uncharacteristic. As they approached Rumsfeld’s office he was at the door, not wanting to let them into the room as he had other matters to attend to. Myers was grilled by Rumsfeld, who asked questions but didn’t adopt any position. Rumsfeld was “more of a lawyer than most lawyers when it comes to precision and question,” a stickler for the law who constantly invoked the Constitution and statutes, Feith reported.

As Rumsfeld fired his bullets at Myers, Feith described how he jumped protectively in front of Myers. He paused and looked me straight in the eye. “I gave a little speech – I remember – I don’t often remember what I said in meetings – but this I remembered. This was an interesting moment.” This was how he put it.

“There is no country in the world that has a larger interest in promoting the respect for the Geneva Conventions as law than the United States, and there is no institution in the US government that has a stronger interest than the Prentagon.” And then I said something else that was kind of interesting to them. “Obeying the Geneva Conventions is not optional. The U.S. Constitution says there are two things that are the supreme law of the land – statutes and treaties.” He said, “Yeah.” And I said, “The Geneva Conventions are a treaty in force. It is as much part of the supreme law of the United States as a statute.” […]

I was impressed, but how had they gone from that discussion to the decision that none of the detainees had any rights under the rules reflected in Geneva? Feith seemed surprised by my question and went on to explain […] In his view, Geneva didn’t apply to Al Qaeda fighters, because they weren’t part of a state and so couldn’t claim rights under a treaty that was only binding on states. Geneva did apply to the Taliban, but by Geneva’s own terms Taliban fighters weren’t entitled to POW status because they hadn’t worn uniforms or insignia […] He referred again to the incentive system that was built into the Geneva Conventions, providing the greatest protection to non-combatants and the least protection to “fighters who don’t obey the rules.” “If we promiscuously hand out POW status to fighters who don’t obey the rules,” Feith offered, “you are undermining the incentive system that was wisely built into the Geneva Conventions.” This was at least arguable, I thought. But what should have been left was the safety net provided by Common Article 3, including the prohibition on abusive interrogation. But that too went: none of the detainees could rely on Common Article 3 since its provision only applied to “armed conflicts onot of an international charter.”

This was the legal argument that the SCOTUS rejected today. It’s simple to do, since Common Article 3 was backed up by customary law, every judgment of international courts and tribunals, and the official commentary to Geneva. Feith spun this as a protection of Geneva, when it in fact was a destruction.

Because Feith’s argument rested on defending Geneva, the senior officers were confused with the ruling, and more so the soliders carrying out the dictates. As Sands says in the book, “with confusion comes uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes a greater likelihood of abuse.” And this original sin created intentional confusion. If the detainees had no legal rights, there was no restriction on doing whatever necessary in interrogation to extract intelligence.

Sands, by the way, appeared on Capitol Hill this week to discuss his findings in the book, but Republicans attempted to use a rare objection to unanimous consent to force the Senate into recess and shut down the hearing. They didn’t even want these words to come out. Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t shut down the court.

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It’s Never A Bad Time…

by dday

…to note Bill Kristol getting something spectacularly wrong. This is from December 2006.

KRISTOL: You know, Bill Clinton won a nomination in 1992 against a weak field. Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, chose not to run. George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, chose not to run. Al Gore and Dick Gephardt, who had run in ’88, chose not to run. The heavyweights didn’t run. Bill Clinton had a sketchy field against him and won the nomination, despite various missteps and flaws.

Hillary Clinton, it looks like to me, is now going to follow in Bill Clinton’s footsteps. If she gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. She wants to be the centrist.

I think she’s taking some risks in staying on the center, not going to left, which is intelligent. She can still beat the left-wing democratic candidates, I think. And then she’s pretty well-positioned for the general election. So this is all good for Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.

It’s that kind of crackerjack political acumen that gets you a coveted editorial slot in the New York Times. So in an effort at enhancing my own personal upward mobility, let me say this: no way gas ever gets to $3.50 a gallon, they won’t end The Sopranos without letting you know if Tony lives or dies, and the Patriots lose a game? Are you kidding?

Giuliani ’08

(can I get my column now?)

via TBogg

Back Scratch Fever

by digby

Yesterday, Howie Klein posted this at Crooks and Liars. I was going to write something about it as well but decided this says it all, so I’m just publishing the whole thing as is:

Blue America has been asking for donations to help in our nonpartisan campaign to hold members of Congress accountable when they vote against the Constitution. For the past two weeks we’ve been running TV spots, radio spots and newspaper ads in Chris Carney’s northeast Pennsylvania congressional district to make sure his constituents know that he is behaving like a Republican rubber stamp, not like the Democrat they thought they elected in 2006. Today the ACLU, as well as Senators Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold issued strong statements showing what a complete sham the “compromise” the Republicans and a handful of reactionary Democrats have worked out. On top of that, as Glenn Greenwald explained yesterday, Comcast– Carney’s #2 campaign donor– is protecting him from his own constituents by censoring the debate and refusing to allow the Blue America ads to run (although all the radio ads, 7 full page newspaper ads and the non-Comcast TV ads have all been running). Listen to the Blue America radio ad that has been running all over Carney’s district.

I’m sure you can guess which side of this battle John W. McCain is on. If you would like to stand with Blue America, most congressional Democrats and Barack Obama in preventing warrantless wiretaps on American citizens and preventing retroactive immunity for criminal allies of the Bush Regime please consider even a $5 or $10 contribution to the Blue America vs Retroactive Immunity fund today.

What a nice little racket these media/communications giants and politicians have going. They aren’t just scratching each others backs. They’re giving each other full body massages, complete with happy endings. It’s a bad deal for everyone else. If you feel like spending a couple of bucks to defend your right to criticize the media without having to “love them long time,” click the link.

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The Daily Torture Bulletin

by digby

This one’s a little closer to home than some, which doesn’t make it more important than the Guantanamo and terrorism cases. But does at least indicate that there might someday be some decent legal doctrine prohibiting police officers from torturing American citizens whenever they want to coerce them into instant compliance:

Taser International Inc., the largest stun-gun maker, lost a $6.2 million jury verdict over the death of a California man who died after police shot him multiple times with the weapon. The defeat is the first for Taser in a product- liability claim.

A San Jose, California, jury yesterday said Taser had failed to warn police in Salinas, California, that prolonged exposure to electric shock from the device could cause a risk of cardiac arrest. The jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages and $5.2 million in punitive damages to the estate of Robert Heston, 40, and his parents. The jury cleared the police officers of any liability.

His parents sued Taser, alleging failure to warn of the dangers of the weapon, and Salinas police officers, claiming excessive force. The jury “exonerated the police because they said the police didn’t know repeated exposures could kill someone,” Burton said.

I’ve written a ton on tasers and for those who don’t read this blog often, let me just issue the standard disclaimer that I understand that the police have hard jobs and that there are times when a taser can be a useful alternative to deadly force. These product liability cases like that mentioned above deal with the physical dangers that tasering presents to people who may have health conditions that make a taser deadly or suffer from repeated tasering.

But the principle is actually bigger than this. Police around the country are using these things indiscriminately and the result is that cops are commonly zapping citizens with 50,000 volts pretty much any time they feel like it. Because it doesn’t leave permanent damage, people think there’s no harm in it. (This tracks with the John Yoo definitions of torture in which psychological torture is benign and the pain must be equal to the pain of organ failure or death.)

In a free country, the authorities should not have the right to inflict pain on citizens unless they are under threat of violence themselves. Self defense, period. Nowadays it’s tase first and ask questions later, no requirement that they even perceive themselves to be in any danger. It’s a “control” device:

There are numerous other accounts recorded on video and elsewhere in which police are tasering people to get them to instantly comply with their orders. There are also cases where the subject says something the cop doesn’t like or fails to respond quickly enough. We’ve seen many cases in which the police seem to be using the taser for convenience — they don’t want to take the time to assess the situation, talk to the person or otherwise use time tested policing techniques to defuse the situation. Instead, they pull out the taser and after a dull warning (if that), they drop the person to the ground screaming and writhing in pain, often more than once, telling them that if they “say another word” they’ll get it again.

That is un-American. There is nothing in our constitution that says authorities have the right to intentionally inflict pain simply because a citizen is uncooperative. Indeed, we are explicitly given the right to demand that the authorities have good reason to detain us, search our property and arrest us. Torturing citizens for no other reason than looking at a policeman sideways wasn’t specifically contemplated in the constitution, but it is pretty obvious that it would be considered a big no-no. They outlawed cruel punishment for convicted criminals, after all. Doing it to citizens with no due process stands our entire system on its head.

It’s sad that it takes “product liability” cases to do anything about this. It should be a clear cut civil liberties case. But right now this appears to to be the best we can do.

Here’s Amnesty’s position on tasers.

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Meet The Devious, Corrupt, Scheming Face Of Voter Fraud

by dday

It’s a 97 year-old woman who has voted in every election since 1932.

Whew! Did we ever dodge a bullet forcing this lady to admit she didn’t have a birth certificate. Fraudster! Sure, she claims they weren’t issued in Kentucky in 1910 where she was born, as if we can believe a known cheat.

Her and the other 40,000 whose voter registration cards have been rejected in Arizona can just sit on the sidelines while the real Americans vote this November. Our democracy is on the verge of collapse from this terrible scourge of voter fraud. I mean, nobody can find any instances of it, but that’s why it’s so dangerous!

If we let all the 97 year-olds vote for President, the terrorists will have already won.

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Cobwebs

by digby

From Kathy G, I see that Camille Paglia has had an epiphany. Or maybe she’s on hard drugs. It’s hard to tell the difference.

Camille’s comment speaks for itself:

Meanwhile, conservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama. He’s a Marxist! A radical leftist! A hater of America! He’s “not that bright”; he can’t talk without a teleprompter. He knows nothing and has done less. His wife is a raging mass of anti-white racism. It’s gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about having this ludicrous sideshow act on my side. I guess it’s a good thing — the more votes the better, right? But I can’t help feeling that something very bad will happen.

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Johnny’s Little Helpers

by digby

The Democratic primary is just over and we can already see two ways in which McCain’s media base is helping him. First, they are obsessing about how much the Republican base is “rejecting” him. This is supposed to be a terrible thing, but in a year in which Republicanism is more toxic than expired dog food, it actually gives many people a reason to vote for him. No doctrinaire Republican could win in this environment and his fanboys in the media are happy to make sure that everyone sees him as they do — a macho, go-to-hell, Teddy Roosevelt reformer type.

The second way in which his fan base is helping him is this new defensiveness on his behalf about Barack’s supposed ageism. Following up on D-day’s post below, Steve Benen reports that the media is rushing to help John McCain by characterizing every criticism as an ageist slam. (If only they had had half this sensitivity in the Democratic primary…)

Benen writes:

I can appreciate the fact that the McCain campaign and Republicans in general are a little touchy about the senator’s age — running to be the oldest president in U.S. history will do that — but that’s no reason to characterize every critical adjective in the language as some kind of slight about McCain’s septuagenarian status.

Poll after poll shows that more voters trust Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on matters of national security than they do Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois. Hoping to bridge that chasm, the Obama campaign and Democrats harped on comments McCain made on the Today show this morning, repeatedly calling the 71-year-old presumptive GOP presidential nominee “confused,” seeming to feed into concerns voters might have about the Arizonan’s age.

After McCain said this morning that it’s “not too important” when U.S. troops come home from Iraq, Obama aide Susan Rice said on a conference call that McCain’s comments reveal a “real confusion and lack of understanding of the situation in Iraq” and the larger region. She added that McCain’s series of errors of fact and judgment are “reflective of a pattern of lack of understanding and lack of strategic depth.” Reporters, apparently having internalized McCain’s talking points, asked Rice if she was attacking McCain’s age by calling him “confused.” She responded, “[W]hat I meant by that is very simple — on critical, factual questions that are fundamental to understanding what’s going on in Iraq and the region, Sen. McCain has gotten it wrong. And not just once but repeatedly.”

“Confused” is a term that Obama himself uses all the time, in many different contexts. It’s not ageist when he says:

Senator Clinton used this to try to imply that I wasn’t serious about bringing this war to an end. I just have to mention this because I don’t want anybody here to be confused…I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009. So don’t be confused. Don’t be confused.

The report that was produced led to the following conclusion: “All of their comments reflect a lack of a clear documented process at Walter Reed for helping OIF/OEF servicemembers transition to VA.” The report also stated that servicemembers were “frustrated, confused, sometimes angry” over their experiences at Walter Reed and that soldiers without family support were “depressed and sad and by themselves.

… if anyone has been confused by these emails, I want you to know that today I’ll be speaking from my heart, and as a true friend of Israel. And I know that when I visit with AIPAC, I am among friends. Good friends. Friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow, and forever.

Benen rightly notes that this is a perfectly good word for anyone to use to describe a political opponent’s incoherent policies, regardless of age. But in this case, it also happens to be in Barack’s common vocabulary. It’s one of his “words.”

I suppose it’s inevitable considering the “firsts” in this campaign that everything will be fought on the identity battlefield. So while it is a cynical, hypocritical move on the part of the McCain campaign to capitalize on these themes (it wasn’t long ago they would have been screaming “PC, PC, PC!”) it’s logical that they would do it.

But the press has absorbed it and is carrying McCain’s water for him, defending him against attacks on the exact basis he wants them to and putting their thumbs on the scale. As usual. I can’t tell you how shocked I am.

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