Month: May 2010

Consensus

by digby

The Red Cross dropped a bombshell yesterday:

The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.

Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.

However, it has said it will look into the abuse allegations made to the BBC.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram.

“The ICRC is being notified by the US authorities of detained people within 14 days of their arrest,” a Red Cross spokesman said.

“This has been routine practice since August 2009 and is a development welcomed by the ICRC.”

The spokesman was responding to a question from the BBC about the existence of the facility, referred to by many former prisoners as the Tor Jail, which translates as “black jail”.

There have been reports of abuses in this separate prison and the military has subsequently denied the prison’s existence. The military lied.

Jeffrey Kaye reports on the background to this story, here:

Last month, BBC reported on conditions at the main Parwan facility. The scenes as described were right out of the iconography of Guantanamo. Prisoners in handcuffs and leg shackles, “moved around in wheelchairs” with blackout goggles and headphones “to block out all sound.” This was the treatment for a prison population that even the U.S. military admits is far and away not made up of serious terrorists. Meanwhile, the number held at Bagram has swelled to approximately 800 prisoners. But we don’t know how many are in the other, “the Black Hole.” We don’t know because the U.S. still insists that no second prison exists. Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, are tossed into cold concrete cells, where the light is kept on 24 hours. Noise machines fill their cells with constant sound, and prisoners are sleep deprived as a matter of policy, with each cell monitored by a camera, so the authorities will know when someone is falling asleep and come to wake them. Prisoners are beaten and abused. According to BBC’s article last month, one prisoner was “made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.” Both the Washington Post and the New York Times reported late last year on conditions at the black-site prison, believed to be run by U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Each of these reports noted that prisoners were subjected to abuse. One prisoner, a 42-year-old farmer named Hamidullah told the New York Times about his stay in the Tor prison, June through October 2009:

I can’t remember the number of days I spent there because it’s hard to tell days from nights in the black jail, but I think every day they came twice to ask questions. They took me to their own room to ask the questions. They beat up other people in the black jail, but not me. But the problem was that they didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep…. The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place. It is a place where everybody is afraid. In the black jail, they can do anything to detainees.

Together with the BBC investigation and the ICRC confirmation, we can see that the military is lying through their teeth when they claim there is no second Bagram facility, or that no abuse takes place at Bagram. (For more on Bagram and the issue of indefinite detention, see this recent diary by Jim White.)

The United States is still torturing. Oh sure, they probably aren’t waterboarding. But then, waterboarding was never the only form of torture that was used.

I’ve held off on this issue because of the unequivocal denial by the military that the prison existed and I was willing to give the new administration the benefit of the doubt. Now that the Red Cross has confirmed that the prison does exist, we know for sure that the military was lying — and the benefit of the doubt goes to the former prisoners.
I should have known better. Any administration which declares that it has the right to unilaterally order American citizens to be assassinated obviously isn’t going to be squeamish about a little torture, is it?

*For those who may not have followed the torture saga fully, the Red Cross being made aware does not mean there was no torture. In order to keep its access to the prisons, the Red Cross keeps all its visits confidential, even when it requires that they keep abuse and torture secret.

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The Opening

by digby

Financial Reform is turning out to be quite an interesting drama. Too Big To Fail didn’t happen, but the Audit the Fed bill passed unanimously yesterday (although Ron Paul is still kvetching, naturally — he won’t be happy until we officially go back to the feudal system.) And today the consumer focused Merkley-Klobuchar Amendment to Protect Homeowners from Deceptive Mortgage Practices passed as well, with some crossover Republican votes to boot. This shows that the Republicans know they are vulnerable to the populist critique and are giving a bipartisan veneer to financial legislation so they can inoculate themselves.

When you look at the greater narratives taking shape in this era, you have to look at the underlying storylines. And the starting point for Republicans is, and always has been, its close relationship with big business and big money. During periods of economic well-being, when the American Dream seems within easy reach, this works well for their coalition of resentful white people, social conservatives and the wealthy. In bad times, this can be problematic.

The Democrats could have taken advantage of this structural weakness in the GOP narrative and come down hard with a populist attack on the Reagan era and particularly the Bush years, but they chose not to play the blame game and look in the rear view mirror. (They have, of course, been complicit, so it makes it much more difficult). Still, the fact is that the structural narrative that has existed for 70 years or so still exists and they had an opening but were so wedded to neo-liberal principles (which they seem to have confused with politics) they have mostly squandered their opportunity. The way this Financial Reform debate is unfolding indicates there’s still some daylight if they choose to take advantage of it.

All indications are that they don’t have the nerve. But it’s there.

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It’s Official —Bart Stupak Is A Moron

by digby

Looks like he finally figured out that the political arm of the Catholic Church cares more about its political clout with the GOP than the teaching of Jesus Christ:

Michigan congressman Bart Stupak, who played a pivotal role in the passage of the health care bill, said there is something worse than the hatred – including death threats and angry calls to his house – he experienced because of his support for the legislation. “Ultimately, what stings the most isn’t the hatred,” wrote Stupak in a column posted on the Newsweek magazine’s website. “It’s that people tried to use abortion as a tool to stop health-care reform, even after protections were added.”

Update: Looks like this is what has the DC Dems quaking:

In response to CongressmanAlan Mollohan’s loss to state Senator Mike Oliverio in the West
Virginia primary election tonight, Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser, offered the following statement:

“Just as Bart Stupak did, Congressman Mollohan now fully realizes thatvotes do have consequences. Mollohan’s loss comes as a direct resultof his vote for healthcare reform that included federal funding ofabortion.

“We promised Rep. Mollohan and the other ‘pro-life’ Democrats that we would make their re-election incredibly painful if they voted ‘yes’ on the healthcare bill. Tonight, the Susan B. Anthony List followed through on that promise, and Rep. Mollohan is the second member of that coalition to see those consequences.

“This should be just another sign to ‘pro-life’ Democrats that voted for the healthcare bill that they will face the same consequences as Stupak and Mollohan.”

The Susan B. Anthony List spent $78,000 in West Virginia’s first district educating voters on Congressman Mollohan’s vote for healthcare with television ads, radio ads, and robo-calls. This is part of a $1 million effort to ensure that true pro-life leaders are
elected in the districts of the so-called ‘pro-life’ Democrats, including Reps. Brad Ellsworth (IN-08), Steve Driehaus (OH-01) and Kathy Dahlkemper (PA-03), who voted for healthcare reform that included federal funding of abortion.

Except, of course, it didn’t.

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Case Closed

by digby

I’m sure Andrew Sullivan and the rest of the critics who made assumptions about Kagan based on stereotypes and schoolyard level gossip will find this unpersuasive. But it rings true to me. (And I hope all those nice liberals who made the same assumptions and whispered it in everyone’s ears will do a little soul searching about why they made them.)

More here from Jamison Foser on the bigger question of the epic fail of the chattering class on this issue.

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Lock And Load

by digby

Such funny guys, especially with the death threats and all:

Congressional District 11 GOP candidate Brad Goehring is drawing fire for his confrontational Facebook statement today: “If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to “thin” the herd.”

He later said he meant to “thin the herd” with votes, not bullets and that he just hit the send button to early and then just left it there because he didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. That’s nice.

But the truth is that this is a very old joke, which I’m sure this numbskull has seen:

Here is the story of some of these adorable jokes, but the first “Liberal Hunting Permit” shown above has been around for years. These are the kind of things they sell CPAC every year. It’s perfectly common right wing rhetoric.

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If You Can’t See it, It Isn’t Happening

by digby

I had been wondering about this. It’s seemed as though the Gulf spill wasn’t getting the kind of coverage it merits, but I didn’t know if it was just me. Apparently not:

A few comments. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 obviously got an enormous amount of coverage, but it’s striking that even incidents like the 1978 Amoco Cadiz accident off the coast of France got far more coverage than the current BP spill. (Brulle focused on nightly network coverage because, he points out, that’s still the biggest driver of public opinion in the country—after all, only a very small subset of people read the Times.)

The reporter,Brad Plumer, notes that some of this is because the pictures aren’t there — not enough dead birds and fish to make people understand how huge this is. I’m sure that’s part of it. And it isn’t an accident:

Now, part of the explanation here is that BP has been quite deft at managing appearances. For one, they’re using hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants to break up the oil before it can reach the beaches, causing it to sink down to the sea floor. In some cases, these dispersants could be more harmful, ecologically speaking, then letting the oil wash ashore. We don’t know what’s in these chemicals and there’s a very high potential that they could do a lot of damage to the food chain in the Gulf. Indeed, that’s why Exxon was constrained from using dispersants in Prince William Sound back in 1989. But, from BP’s perspective (and the Obama administration’s), avoiding the sort of graphic imagery that Exxon had to deal with in Alaska seems appealing.

Right. That was undoubtedly their main concern. Unfortunately:

The chemical dispersants being used to break up the oil leaking into the gulf following the explosion of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig have the potential to cause just as much, if not more, harm to the environment and the humans coming into contact with it than the oil possibly would if left untreated.

That is the warning of toxicology experts, led by Dr. William Sawyer, addressing the Gulf Oil Disaster Recovery Group, a group of lawyers working to protect the rights and interests of environmental groups and persons affected by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The group represents the United Fishermen’s Association and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), among others.

Various publications from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council show that baseline data on the environmental and ecologic fate of petroleum spills and their effects in the marine environment is substantially deficient, said Dr. Sawyer. The lack of substantial research in these areas makes many of the decision-making processes pertaining to successful major spill containment and remediation rife with speculation.

The ongoing discharge of petroleum from the BP site, with a concurrent substantial use of surface and deep-water dispersants, demonstrates an environmental release of toxicants into the marine, marsh and beach environments in an unprecedented way, said Lead Counsel Stuart Smith for Gulf Oil Disaster Recovery Group. Mr. Smith was the first to challenge British Petroleum on the failure of its cofferdam cap on the DEEPWATER HORIZON and has won two successful injunctions requiring British Petroleum to respect fishermen’s legal rights and protect their health in all areas impacted by the Gulf oil spill.

These dispersants are the environmental equivalent of tasers. They may be killers, but the don’t leave marks and that’s all that matters.

We are a nation of cover-up artists. And most people are good with that because the scope of the disasters we are confronting are overwhelming. But you can’t hide from this level of failure anymore. It’s building and building on itself, which is why there is a growing sense of social unrest. Leadership is required to help people understand what’s happening and it isn’t happening.

Update: And then there’s this.

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What Dick Said

by digby

California Democrat John Burton is a jerk, but sometimes he hurls his curmudgeonly vitriol with panache:

In our Saturday post about the California Democratic Party’s ad attacking Meg Whitman but masquerading as an “issues ad,” we described the abrupt ending to our conversation with CDP Chairman John Burton. Through his spokesman, Burton on Monday complained that he had been misquoted. Burton says he didn’t say “Fuck you.” His actual words were, “Go fuck yourself.” Calbuzz regrets the error.

/p>

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Making My Point

by digby

The writer at the CBS site “The Coop” seems to think this is a brilliant insight:

Let’s focus on the most explosive and, I think, the most ludicrous: Her supposed “connection” to Goldman Sachs. Greenwald links to Digby, who links to USA Today -gotta love those links – which notes that Kagan received $10,000 in 2008 for serving as a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute. Well, as the noted constitutional scholar and former New Jersey Nets forward Derrick Coleman was wont to exclaim on occasion, whoop-de-damn-do. Fact is that the “Digby” post offers nothing in the way of evidence that points to a nefarious connection. Read a little further, though, and you’ll find the author’s real point: “I think Supreme Court confirmation battles are ideologically instructive for the nation and are one of the few times when it’s possible for people to speak at length about their philosophical worldview. Liberals have to stop running from this. Allowing the other side to define us is killing us.” There you have it. This is really about politics and dissatisfaction with the Obama administration. Some on the lib-left would like the White House to tack far harder in their direction and they are not pleased at his political instinct to move toward the middle. That’s an argument they can have, though now it looks as if Kagan will get caught in the cross-fire.

Uhm, yes. That was exactly my point. And the problem is?

Indeed, in a subsequent post, I made the point about the Goldman Sachs connection so damned political it hurts:

[I]t really irks the hell out of me that if we are going to have a big confirmation battle (which goes without saying) the administration is going put themselves in a position in which they have to defend Kagan’s Goldman Sachs ties while Jeff Sessions prances around like the second coming of William Jennings Bryan. Unless they think it’s a terrific idea to convince the American people once and for all that the Republican Party is the people’s only defense against Big Government and Wall Street, I can’t think of a more counterproductive political fight.

Obviously, I don’t know if the GOP will find it in themselves to bash their good friends at Goldman but I do think it’s stupid to hand them weapons to make points like this, however. If we’re going to have a fight, then I’d prefer that it be a real ideological battle rather than allow the Republicans to be wolves in populist clothing.

Supreme Court battles are inherently political and the Republicans, at least, make no bones about using them to advance their agenda. This should not be news to very important journalists unless they’ve been watching this nominating kabuki dance with the credulity of 12 year olds. My gripe is that Democrats are really bad dancers. In fact, they refuse to dance at all.

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One America

by digby

This morning a group of Latino organizations, civil liberties advocates, and bloggers sent a letter to Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig asking him to relocate the All-Star game from Arizona out of respect for its Latino players. Blue America was proud to sign on to that letter and was so inspired by the effort that we created the One America campaign to back Congressman Raul Grijalva in his lone crusade among Arizona’s elected reps to boycott Arizona until they reverse this unamerican profiling law.

Howie eloquently made the case:

Leadership is nothing new for Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a booming voice on behalf of working families on every issue that comes before Congress. He helped lead the fight against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, helped lead the fight against Wall Street predators and helped lead the fight for equitable health care.

He was also the first member of Congress– and, significantly, the only member from Arizona– to stand up and take a principled and passionate stand against SB 1070, the foundations of an apartheid police state. He first called on Arizona’s governor to veto the patently unconstitutional anti-immigrant bill. After she enthusiastically embraced it, he sent a letter to President Obama urging him to exercise his “authority to limit [federal] cooperation with Arizona officials in their enforcement of SB 1070.” Finally on April 29, he released the following statement:

“The governor and legislature are blind to what this bill will really do to citizens, law enforcement and the state economy. Tourists will not come to a state with discriminatory policies on the books. Businesses will not move here. Hispanic workers and taxpayers will leave. If state lawmakers don’t realize or don’t care how detrimental this will be, we need to make them understand somehow. We are calling on organizations not to schedule conventions or conferences in the state until it reverses this decision. This is a specifically targeted call for action, not a blanket rejection of the state economy. Conventions are a large source of visitors and revenue, and targeting them is the most effective way to make this point before it’s too late. Just as professional athletes refused to recognize Arizona until it recognized Martin Luther King Jr., we are calling on businesses and organizations not to bring their conventions to Arizona until it recognizes civil rights and the meaning of due process. We don’t want to sustain this effort any longer than necessary. It’s about sending a message.”

The response has been a barrage of death threats from neo-Nazi groups, both to the Congressman and to his staff.

Please help us get Raúl’s back by donating one dollar– for ONE AMERICA– to his re-election campaign at One America. (If you want to donate $1,001, that’s fine too.)

You can read the letter to Selig at Crooks and Liars.

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Kagan Was Literally Inevitable

by digby

Walter Shapiro offers up a funny (but plausible) reason Obama picked Kagan: she was literally the only possible choice.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that members of the Supreme Court must be lawyers. But a long line of activist presidents – both Democrats and Republicans – have altered the original intent of the Framers so that a degree from an Eastern elitist law school is now almost a constitutional necessity. If Elena Kagan (Harvard Law ’86) is confirmed for the Court, all nine justices would have received their legal training at Harvard or Yale.

This is one of those moments when you sense that American democracy is more of a rigged game than they taught you back in high school civics classes. Few object to a meritocracy in which people, regardless of family backgrounds, are judged by what they have accomplished in life. But should that binding decision have been made by the admissions committees at two law schools when the applicants were still in their early 20s? Imagine a guidance counselor shouting, “Future Supreme Court justices over here. Everyone else, best of luck with your legal careers – if you don’t aim too high.”

Once the criterion was Harvard, Yale or bust, it was almost inevitable that Elena Kagan, the former dean of guess-what-law-school, would have been tapped for the Supreme Court. This is not an exaggeration. Let’s do the math together.

Kagan is clearly qualified for the job. Nonetheless it’s amusing to see wingnuts and Villagers carrying on about Kagan being unqualified, since the qualifications she’s gathered are the very ones that have have been so clearly demanded for the job.

The question of diversity is always an interesting one. Back in the beginning of the Republic it was all about region, then came religion, then race, ethnicity and gender. And it was common to choose people outside the legal profession until recently. “Diversity” has shifting definition that changes with the nation, which is kind of ironic considering all the legal sturm and drang about whether or not the constitution is a living document: it’s quite clear that the Court itself is a (slowly) evolving institution.

I’m guessing this will be the last Ivy league choice for a while.

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