Month: July 2009

Mites Of The Roundtable

by digby

Stephanopoulos reported on This Week that the possible Holder investigation is going to be very narrow and will not pursue policy makers or anyone who took orders directly from the policymakers. He’s going after “rogue interrogators” who inflicted more torture than was strictly allowed.

The Village roundtable all gasped in horror anyway because who knows where such an investigation might lead and as Cokie complained, it would mean that the whole town would be mad at each other again and nobody wants that! “Everybody hates each other and the poison gets very thick.” She did finally come down on the side of following the rule of law even though it would make her uncomfortable at cocktail parties, but it was a close thing.

Bob Woodward was very upset at the idea that the government can’t keep secrets because “we need them!” Besides, Holder shouldn’t be like Janet Reno and just initiate investigations willy nilly. (He seems to think that Reno authorizing independent counsels to investigate her own president for trivial political reasons is the same thing as investigating whether the previous administration tortured prisoners.) They all chuckled at the notion that Holder was really independent and if he is, that means he’s a rogue interrogator himself.

George Will thought it was all just a bunch of balderdash because nothing bad ever happened during the Bush administration. Sam Donaldson said that reporters should probably pursue stories and Donna Brazile added that these things were coming out anyway so they might as well be investigated.

They all snorted and giggled and laughed throughout the whole segment about how silly it was to be upset that the CIA lied because well, that’s what it does. And they all thought it was a ripping good joke that Cheney kept everything secret because well, everyone knows that’s what he does. Hahahahaha.

And then they talked about Michael Jackson.

Update: Greenwald has more on the possible scope of the Holder investigation. There is some conflicting information. Clearly, these are all trial balloons.

I don’t know about you, but I find it somewhat distasteful that such an important and serious matter is being tested in the press for political reaction. I guess it’s better than nothing, but I would think that Justice Department investigations should be undertaken without regard to public reaction.

Update II: Scarecrow covers the Mites’ equally horrific health care discussion. Oy.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Bang-bang, shoot ‘em up, 1-2-3

By Dennis Hartley

Come and get me, copper: Johnny Depp in Public Enemies

If you blink, you might miss the chance to revel in a delicious moment of schadenfreude in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies that decidedly contemporizes this otherwise ol’skool “gangsters vs. G-men” opus. In the midst of conducting an armed robbery, the notoriously felonious John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) notices that a bank employee has reflexively emptied his pockets of some crumpled bills and loose change onto his desk. “That’s your money, mister?” Dillinger asks. “Yes,” the frightened man replies. Dillinger gives him a bemused look and says, “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours. Put it away.” I almost stood up and cheered…then I remembered that a) Dillinger was a murderous thug, and b) I would never even fantasize about participating in such a caper, so I thought better of it. Still, I couldn’t help but savor an opportunity for a little vicarious thrill at watching a bank getting hosed. I don’t know…it could’ve had something to with the fact that my bank recently doubled my credit card interest, even after they eagerly gobbled up the bailout money that was funded by my hard-earned tax dollars (ya think?). In fact, in the context of our current economic woes, one can watch Mann’s film and sort of grok how John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd and other “public enemy” list alums gained folk hero cachet during the Great Depression.

Mann focuses his story on the last year or so of Dillinger’s short life (he was only 31 when he was fatally ambushed by FBI agents while exiting a movie screening at Chicago’s Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934). The film literally opens with a bang, with Dillinger and his gang shooting their way out of a Lima, Ohio prison in 1933 (that is, assuming that Mann is being historically accurate). While this is not the first crime thriller to open with a prison break (one of Mann’s prime influences, Jean-Pierre Melville came to mind as I watched), it is an exciting and well-mounted sequence that is bestowed with a jolting sense of immediacy and hyper-realism through Mann’s use of hi-def video. Unfortunately (with the exception of a pulse-pounding reenactment of a pre-dawn gun battle between Dillinger’s gang and FBI agents at the remote Little Bohemia Lodge) the rest of the film never quite lives up to the collar-grabbing promise of its opening salvo.

There’s only one thing a notorious bank robber wants to do as soon as he busts out of the slammer (hint: the film’s catchphrase is “I rob banks.”). OK…maybe there are two things. Rising star Marion Cotillard (who made a splash last year as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose) plays Dillinger’s French-Native American girlfriend, Billie Frechette with an earthy sexiness that spices up all her scenes with Depp (although she is not given much to do beyond playing the stalwart gangster moll). When he’s not wooing his beloved Billie, Dillinger spends most of his time robbing banks and staying one step ahead of his arch-nemesis, Melvin Purvis (a subdued Christian Bale) who was one of J. Edgar Hoover’s golden boys back in the fledgling days of the FBI (Billy Crudup hams it up as Hoover). Liverpudlian Stephen Graham appears to be having the time of his life as Dillinger’s most well-known associate, the psychotic Baby Face Nelson (I hailed Graham as a new talent to watch in my 2007 review of This is England). Look fast for Diana Krall’s cameo as a nightclub singer (crooning a smoky “Bye Bye Blackbird”). And of course there is an appearance by “the lady in red” (Branka Katic)-although apparently it was the “lady in the white blouse and orange skirt” who led the unwitting Dillinger to his doom.

It’s a good thing that the charismatic Depp is present, and that the film is stylishly executed in Mann’s fastidious manner, because, had lesser artists been involved, the rote cops and robbers story lurking at its core would be exposed. Although Mann and co-writers Ronan Bennet and Ann Biderman do recycle the narrative device that made his 1995 crime thriller Heat so compelling (i.e., blurring the line of moral demarcation by fleshing out pursuer and quarry with equal import) it all feels sort of perfunctory this time out. And, at the risk of being accused of talking apples and oranges, I felt that Bale and Depp’s Big Scene together failed to ignite sparks like Pacino and DeNiro’s faceoff did in the aforementioned film. As Mann has established himself as an auteur; I don’t think it is unfair to offer that, relative to his own usual standards, this is not his best work (although it’s still superior to most summer fare currently grinding away at the multiplex). That being said, if you are a Depp and/or Mann fan, you still may want to…er, give it a shot.

Enemies list: Dillinger (1945), Dillinger (1973), The FBI Story, The Lady in Red, Young Dillinger, Dillinger and Capone, Ma Barker’s Killer Brood, Bloody Mama, Baby Face Nelson (1957 version), Pretty Boy Floyd, A Bullet for Pretty Boy, Al Capone, Capone , The Untouchables, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us, Manhattan Melodrama, The Roaring Twenties, The Petrified Forest, High Sierra, G Men, The Public Enemy, Each Dawn I Die, White Heat, Little Caesar, Bullets or Ballots, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Last Gangster, Key Largo , Scarface (1932 version), Dead End, Racket Busters, King of the Underworld, Rise & Fall of Legs Diamond, Murder, Inc., Miller’s Crossing, Bugsy , Hoodlum, Billy Bathgate, Mobsters, Lepke, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Cotton Club, Once Upon a Time in America.

Previous posts with related themes:

Great Depression Films

Art of the Heist Film

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Holder Of The Cards

by dday

Newsweek is reporting that the Attorney General is considering the appointment of a special prosecutor to probe the Bush/Cheney torture regime.

Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. “I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda,” he says. “But that can’t be a part of my decision.”

This comes smack dab in the middle of a more personal profile of Holder, with sketches of his easygoing temperament, his fealty to the law measured against his sympathy with the President’s agenda, the figure that he and his wife cut at dinner parties (!), his desire to seek common ground in an Obama-esque fashion, a longish section on the Marc Rich issue, and more. It’s almost an elegy for the Eric Holder before making the decision to appoint an independent prosecutor, if not a warning that this man will be lost if he pursues such a decision. It’s almost that the reporters were preparing a puff piece or beat sweetener and they stumbled upon some hard news.

But there is news here, even beyond the point on an independent prosecutor. The authors try to depict the actions of the Justice Department throughout the Obama Presidency, and on that front, they seem to have taken Holder’s side as someone trying desperately to do the right thing regardless of the consequences. Such as:

Holder couldn’t shake what he had learned in reports about the treatment of prisoners at the CIA’s “black sites.” If the public knew the details, he and his aides figured, there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe. He raised with his staff the possibility of appointing a prosecutor. According to three sources familiar with the process, they discussed several potential choices and the criteria for such a sensitive investigation. Holder was looking for someone with “gravitas and grit,” according to one of these sources, all of whom declined to be named. At one point, an aide joked that Holder might need to clone Patrick Fitzgerald, the hard-charging, independent-minded U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Scooter Libby in the Plamegate affair. In the end, Holder asked for a list of 10 candidates, five from within the Justice Department and five from outside […]

For weeks Holder had participated in a contentious internal debate over whether the Obama administration should release the Bush-era legal opinions that had authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods. He had argued to administration officials that “if you don’t release the memos, you’ll own the policy.” CIA Director Leon Panetta, a shrewd political operator, countered that full disclosure would damage the government’s ability to recruit spies and harm national security; he pushed to release only heavily redacted versions.

Holder and his aides thought they’d been losing the internal battle. What they didn’t know was that, at that very moment, Obama was staging a mock debate in Emanuel’s office in order to come to a final decision. In his address to the cadets, Holder cited George Washington’s admonition at the Battle of Trenton, Christmas 1776, that “captive British soldiers were to be treated with humanity, regardless of how Colonial soldiers captured in battle might be treated.” As Holder flew back to Washington on the FBI’s Cessna Citation, Obama reached his decision. The memos would be released in full.

Holder and his team celebrated quietly, and waited for national outrage to build. But they’d miscalculated. The memos had already received such public notoriety that the new details in them did not shock many people. (Even the revelation, a few days later, that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee had been waterboarded hundreds of times did not drastically alter the contours of the story.) And the White House certainly did its part to head off further controversy. On the Sunday after the memos were revealed, Emanuel appeared on This Week With George Stephanopoulos and declared that there would be no prosecutions of CIA operatives who had acted in good faith with the guidance they were given. In his statement announcing the release of the memos, Obama said, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution.” (Throughout, however, he has been careful to say that the final decision is the attorney general’s to make.)

This depiction of Holder and the Justice Department acting at cross purposes to a White House that wanted to keep a lid on past abuses of the Bush Administration neglects the fact that they have in many cases openly facilitated such a cover-up in court filings. The DoJ has consistently invoked the state secrets privilege to shut down lawsuits, tried to keep various records from the past secret, advocated for things like preventive detention and post-acquittal detention, and so on. Among many liberals the Justice Department has been the source of the greatest disappointment in the entire Administration. Clearly, they got the ear of Newsweek, who decided to paint a narrative around this decision on an independent prosecutor. But it doesn’t totally scan. Here’s the conclusion:

The next few weeks, though, could test Holder’s confidence. After the prospect of torture investigations seemed to lose momentum in April, the attorney general and his aides turned to other pressing issues. They were preoccupied with Gitmo, developing a hugely complex new set of detention and prosecution policies, and putting out the daily fires that go along with running a 110,000-person department. The regular meetings Holder’s team had been having on the torture question died down. Some aides began to wonder whether the idea of appointing a prosecutor was off the table.

But in late June Holder asked an aide for a copy of the CIA inspector general’s thick classified report on interrogation abuses. He cleared his schedule and, over two days, holed up alone in his Justice Department office, immersed himself in what Dick Cheney once referred to as “the dark side.” He read the report twice, the first time as a lawyer, looking for evidence and instances of transgressions that might call for prosecution. The second time, he started to absorb what he was reading at a more emotional level. He was “shocked and saddened,” he told a friend, by what government servants were alleged to have done in America’s name. When he was done he stood at his window for a long time, staring at Constitution Avenue.

The failure to hold those who directed and authorized torture to account impacts our national security and foreign policy in so many different ways, beyond encouraging further abuses and encroachment of executive power. Just this week, alleged cases of torture by the Mexican government in prosecuting the drug war have been revealed, and despite American funding contributing indirectly to these actions, we have little recourse to mount any efforts against it.

Many Mexican human rights activists do not support the [human rights] conditions, noting that they were imposed by a U.S government widely accused of torturing prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“It really takes a lot of cynicism, a lot of hypocrisy, for the United States to say, ‘We will give you money to fight drug trafficking as long as you respect human rights,’” said José Raymundo Díaz Taboada, director of the Acapulco office of the Collective Against Torture and Impunity, which documents abuses in Guerrero.

I think nobody will expect Holder to follow through on this until the moment he announces it, especially given the record of the Obama Justice Department. But there’s at least a glimmer of hope that in the documents of the Bush era, the abuses crossed, in the mind of the Attorney General, a bridge too far. And if this is a trial balloon, it’s one of the first in the direction of accountability and justice. Perhaps they’re looking for some agreement.

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Incentives

by digby

If you didn’t see the Bill Moyers interview last night with Wendell Potter, the former Cigna executive who testified before congress last month, you should watch it at the link or at least read the transcript. It’s stuff you know, but this tale of the insurance industry’s skewed, inhumane incentives told from the inside in a clear narrative will jolt you anew:

In his first television interview since leaving the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter tells Bill Moyers why he left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry. “I didn’t intend to [speak out], until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they’ve used over the years, and particularly back in the early ’90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.”

Potter began his trip from health care spokesperson to reform advocate while back home in Tennessee. Potter attended a “health care expedition,” a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, “It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls.”

Looking back over his long career, Potter sees an industry corrupted by Wall Street expectations and greed. According to Potter, insurers have every incentive to deny coverage — every dollar they don’t pay out to a claim is a dollar they can add to their profits, and Wall Street investors demand they pay out less every year. Under these conditions, Potter says, “You don’t think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you’re going to meet Wall Street’s expectations.”

It always seems to circle around to the same problem, doesn’t it?

*Also be sure to watch Moyers’ excellent blogger worthy rant against the Wapo’s Pay2Play scandal.

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Secrets And Lies

by digby

The latest:

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

[…]

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

[…]

Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.

“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial,” one intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity. “That’s worth remembering amid all the drama.”

Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remain secret. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that they felt should have been disclosed.

At first the Republicans were saying this wasn’t such a big deal, that the program was nothing out of the ordinary. Now they are saying that it’s no big deal because it wasn’t fully operational, which is a different thing altoether. And they are forced to admit that the CIA often isn’t forthcoming (in other words, they are breaking the law)

This article implies that the program really is something quite shocking after all —- like Sy Hersh’s report that there was an “executive assassination squad.”

But hey, the last thing we want to do is play the blame game, especially if John Yoo wrote a memo to the file saying it was ok, so there won’t be any serious recriminations. But it’s yet another level in our never ending parlor game called “What Were They Really Doing?”

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Village Secrets

by digby

I’ve been away from the TV for a while and so I missed this amazing confession:

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about how “the dignity code” has been “completely obliterated” in Washington, DC. Discussing the concept on MSNBC today, Brooks recalled how he “sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time”:

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

It’s pretty clear from his subsequent comments that it wasn’t a woman, which of course still leaves dozens of GOP possibilities.

Let me ask you something. If someone puts his hand on your inner thigh, do you just sit there? Even if he is a Senator, I’m pretty sure I would move the hand — or stab it with a fork. Do these media parasites value their access so much that they are willing to grant any kind of “access” themselves? And here I thought the term mediawhore was a metaphor.

If this is such common behavior among Republican Senators that national columnists just sit there and allow themselves to be fondled at dinner parties, it goes a long way toward explaining why nobody in DC thought Larry Craig’s toilet stall foot signals were that big of a deal. They are obviously used to much more aggressive behavior than that.

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Immunization Program

by digby

Needless to say, Greenwald has the definitive overview of the DOJ IG report and Emptywheel has begun the examination of the deep weeds. Ackerman is breaking it all down into choice tasty bits for easy consumption. No need to reiterate any of that here. Just click those links for the full catastrophe.

I would just like to highlight one paragraph of Glenn’s post simply because, to me, it is at the very heart of the issue:

These were not legal opinions in any sense of the word. What happened, instead, is clear: Cheney and Addington knew that Yoo was a hardened ideologue who would authorize anything they wanted. So they purposely chose only him — a low-level Assistant Attorney General — to be “read into” the program, and then used his memos to give themselves legal cover. The same thing happened in the realm of torture. This is what reveals how corrupt is the claim that Bush officials cannot be held accountable for the laws they broke because they had DOJ lawyers telling them it was legal. These legal opinions were anything but exercises in good faith. They were nothing more than bureaucratic cover to commit crimes, and — as the IG Report makes clear — ones that were as factually inaccurate as they were legally flawed (yet John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law).

To accept the central premise of our political class — it’s unfair to prosecute Bush officials for things that DOJ lawyers told them was legal — is to destroy the rule of law in the United States. Presidents will always be able to find subservient John Yoos in the bowels of the DOJ willing to authorize anything they want to do. There is no such thing as a permission slip from an underling to commit felonies. Yet our political class — obviously motivated by their own self-interest — has decided in unison to endorse the principle that the existence of such documents should bar accountability even for clear crimes.

I’ve been struck by this since the beginning. If it is the case that the president can designate an Office of Legal Counsel functionary to immunize government officials and employees against criminal behavior, then it is true, to all intents and purposes that “if the president does it it’s not illegal.”

One could make the argument that the political fallout would be so huge if it were ever revealed that no president would ever attempt it, but we are proving right now that this is a very remote possibility. Ever since Nixon, the political class has reaffirmed the idea that anything the president does as a political leader or in his official capacity is unpunishable. And more recently we’ve seen that anyone who carries out his orders is also immune, which wasn’t always the case. Nixon’s people did do time.

If that was the intention of the revolutionaries who broke away from despotic monarchical rule, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. At this point, both political parties agree that if the president has a low level lawyer in the Justice Department write a secret memo authorizing him to break the law then all those who broke those laws are legally immunized from any punishment, including firing evidently.

There is no political risk in a president breaking the law — a Republican president anyway. It remains to be seen if the Republicans are so consistent when their next turn at power comes around. But as of today, they are the picture of bipartisan comity — the only thing presidents cannot legally do is lie about fellatio. And if the recent cavalcade of lying, adulterers in the GOP are any example, that one may no longer be applicable either. After all, all they have to do is get some clerk in the Justice Department to write them a note legalizing it and it’s all good.

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Tort Reform!

by digby

Oh my goodness….

Ricci is invariably painted as a reluctant standard-bearer; a hardworking man driven to litigation only when his dreams of promotion were shattered by a system that persecutes white men. This is the narrative we will hear next week, but it somewhat oversimplifies Ricci’s actual employment story. For instance, it’s not precisely true, as this one account would have it, that Frank Ricci “never once [sought] special treatment for his dyslexia challenge.” In point of fact, Ricci sued over it.

According to local newspapers, Ricci filed his first lawsuit against the city of New Haven in 1995, at the ripe old age of 20, for failing to hire him as a firefighter. That January, the Hartford Chronicle reported that Ricci sued, saying “he was not hired because he is dyslexic.” The complaint in that suit, filed in federal court, alleged that the city’s failure to hire Ricci because of his dyslexia violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Frank Ricci was one of 795 candidates interviewed for 40 jobs. According to his complaint, the reason he was not hired was that he disclosed his dyslexia in an interview. That case was settled in 1997 with a confidential settlement in which Ricci withdrew his lawsuit in exchange for a job with the fire department and $11,143 in attorney’s fees.

In 1998, Ricci was talking about filing lawsuits again, this time over a dispute with his new employer, Middletown’s South Fire District—which had hired him in August of 1997. According to a Hartford Courant report of Aug. 11, 1998, Ricci was dismissed from the Middletown fire department after only eight months. He promptly appealed his dismissal, claiming that fire officials had retaliated against him for conducting an investigation into the department’s response to a controversial fire. A story in the Hartford Courant dated Aug. 9, 1997, has Ricci vowing “to pursue this to the fullest extent of the law.”

In August of 1998, a state Department of Labor investigation cleared Chief Wayne S. Bartolotta of any wrongdoing in the firing. The Aug. 3, 1998, letter from the state Department of Labor indicated that the case was closed with a finding of no violation. “After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the South Fire District did not discriminate against Mr. Ricci.” Ricci’s response? According to the Courant, Ricci contended “Their decision was political, it has nothing to do with who was right and who was wrong.” He told the paper he would “pursue the matter in civil court.”

Ricci also tried to discredit his former boss, Chief Bartolotta, by disparaging his professional credentials. His fight over access to Bartolotta’s professional training records was resolved between the two of them a week before the matter was slated to be taken up with the state Freedom of Information Commission, according to a Jan. 13, 1998, report in the Hartford Courant.

Eventually, Ricci made his way back to the New Haven Fire Department, where he famously aced his promotions test, then sued, yet again, in 2004.

Ultimately, there are two ways to frame Frank Ricci’s penchant for filing employment discrimination complaints: Perhaps he was repeatedly victimized by a cruel cadre of employers, first for his dyslexia, then again for his role as a whistle-blower, and then a third time for just being white. If that is so, we should all be deeply grateful for the robust civil rights laws that protect Americans from unfair discrimination in the workplace. I look forward to hearing Republican Sen. John Cornyn’s version of that speech next week.

The other way to look at Frank Ricci is as a serial plaintiff—one who reacts to professional slights and setbacks by filing suit, threatening to file suit, and more or less complaining his way up the chain of command. That’s not the typical GOP heartthrob, but I look forward to hearing Sen. Cornyn’s version of that speech next week as well.

read on …

Ricci may very well have been justified in filing all those law suits against his employers for different reasons. Some people are just unlucky. And it has no bearing on the facts of the case in question, obviously, at least at the apellate level which is where Sotomayor heard it.

But let’s face facts. Mr Ricci is obviously not the tough, manly public servant who was cheated out of his rightful job by a the lazy “you know whos” that free ride on the system. It looks like this guy would be a much better poster boy for tort reform than reverse discrimination. Maybe somebody in wingnut central got the file mixed up.

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Best And Brightest Redux

by digby

In the week that Robert McNamara died, it’s more than a little bit chilling to see a headline like this one:

Commander to Seek Expansion of Afghan Forces, Officials Say

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that Afghan security forces will have to expand far beyond currently planned levels if President Obama’s strategy for winning the war there is to succeed, according to senior military officials.

Heads Up

by digby

Physicians for Human Rights Press Release

July 10, 2009, 3:40 p.m. EDT

New Evidence that Bush Administration Impeded 3 Investigations into Alleged Massacre of Up to 2,000 Prisoners in Afghanistan

Human rights group that discovered the mass grave and sued for release of government documents is available for comment.

Cambridge, MA—Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has issued a call for a criminal probe in the wake of a major New York Times story with new evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in 2002.

PHR is calling for the Department of Justice to investigate why the Bush Administration impeded an FBI criminal probe of the alleged Dasht-e-Leili massacre.

According to US government documents obtained by PHR, as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters were reportedly suffocated in container trucks by Afghan forces operating jointly with the US in November 2001. The bodies were reportedly buried in mass graves in the Dasht-e-Leili desert near Sheberghan, Afghanistan. Notorious Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was reportedly on the CIA payroll, is allegedly responsible for the massacre.

Physicians for Human Rights, which shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, first documented the existence of the alleged mass grave in January 2002 and since then:

· Advocated for witnesses to be protected, the mass grave site to be secured, and for a full and impartial investigation;

· Conducted preliminary forensic investigations — including exposing 15 remains and conducting three autopsies — under UN auspices at Dasht-e-Leili;

· Successfully sued for compliance with a PHR Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the release of US government documents that reveal US intelligence knowledge of the magnitude of the alleged crime and awareness of the execution and torture of witnesses to the incidents;

· Helped identify the US chain of command likely responsible for impeding federal investigations into the alleged massacre;

· Discovered and reported on alleged tampering of the site; and

· Requested satellite image analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that appears to demonstrate that tampering occurred soon after PHR filed its FOIA request in June 2006.

“Physicians for Human Rights went to investigate inhumane conditions at a prison in northern Afghanistan, but what we found was much worse,” stated Susannah Sirkin, PHR Deputy Director. “Our researchers documented an apparent mass grave site with reportedly thousands of bodies of captured prisoners who were suffocated to death in trucks. That was 2002; seven years later, we still seek answers about what exactly happened and who was involved.”

Senior Bush Administration officials impeded investigations by the FBI and the State Department, and the Defense Department apparently never conducted a full inquiry, the New York Times reports in the story for the July 11 print edition by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter James Risen.

“The Bush Administration’s disregard for the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions led to torture of prisoners in Guantánamo and many other secret places,” noted Nathaniel Raymond, PHR’s lead researcher on Dasht-e-Leili. “Contrary to the legal opinions of the previous Department of Justice, the principles of the Geneva Conventions are non-negotiable, as is their enforcement. President Obama must open a full and transparent criminal probe and prosecute any US officials found to have broken the law.”

“The State Department’s statement to the New York Times that suspected war crimes should be thoroughly investigated indicates a move towards full accountability,” added Raymond. “We stand ready to aid the US government in investigating this massacre. It is time for the cover-up to end.”

Sirkin added, “President Obama must set a different course by signaling publicly that in all of its operations anywhere in the world, the US and its allies will respect the Geneva Conventions and safeguard the rights of prisoners of war, as well as all captured combatants and detainees to be treated humanely.”

PHR reiterated its call on the Government of Afghanistan, which has jurisdiction over the alleged mass grave site, to:

· Secure the area with the assistance of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force-Afghanistan);

· Protect witnesses to the initial incident and the ensuing tampering; and

· Ensure a full investigation of remaining evidence at the site, including the tracing of the substantial amount of soil that appears to have been removed in 2006.

“Gravesites have been tampered with, evidence has been destroyed, and witnesses have been tortured and killed,” stressed Sirkin. “The Dasht-e-Leili mass grave site must finally be secured, all surviving witnesses must be protected, and the Government of Afghanistan, in coordination with the UN and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), must at last allow a full investigation to go forward.”

McClatchy published a story about this last December but it passed under the radar. The story is potentially explosive, not because it’s about an Afghan warlord who removed the forensic evidence of a war crime, but because he removed the forensic evidence of a war crime that the US knew about, if not actively participated in, and covered up. They didn’t protect the site because they didn’t want it protected. And they didn’t order an investigation because they didn’t want one ordered.

The NY Times story should be very interesting.

Update: The story is up. Read it and weep:

A military commander in the United States-led coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the official, who, in keeping with his organization’s policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and declined to identify the commander.

A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been “stacked like cordwood” in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.

Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports “so they could be debunked.”

But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.

Catch 22 come to life.

We know much about this whole sordid story from the documentary “Convoy of Death,” and earlier stories. And so did the government, which did nothing to protect the crime scene.

Update II:

Obama administration officials said Friday they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who human rights groups allege were killed by U.S.-backed forces.

The mass deaths were brought up anew Friday in a report by The New York Times on its Web site. It quoted government and human rights officials accusing the Bush administration of failing to investigate the executions of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of prisoners.

U.S. officials said Friday they did not have legal grounds to investigate the deaths because only foreigners were involved and the alleged killings occurred in a foreign country.

PHR begs to differ:

“For US Government officials to claim that there is no legal basis to investigate this well-documented mass atrocity is absurd,” stated Physicians for Human Rights Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin. “US military and intelligence personnel were operating jointly and accepted the surrender of the prisoners jointly with General Dostum’s forces in northern Afghanistan. The Obama Administration has a legal obligation to determine what US officials knew, where US personnel were, what involvement they had, and the actions of US allies during and after the massacre. These questions, nearly eight years later, remain unanswered.”

“Furthermore,” added Nathaniel Raymond, PHR’s lead researcher on the Dasht-e-Leili case, “The New York Times has shown that the Bush Administration engaged in a coordinated effort to prevent this alleged war crime from ever being investigated. Under the Geneva Conventions, the cover-up of a war crime can itself constitute a war crime.”

Sorry, those rules don’t apply to the United States of America. We don’t play the blame game here.

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