Month: April 2013

Last chance to win — Blue America Platinum Award contest ends tomorrow

by digby

From Howie:

Tomorrow at 6AM (PT) we’ll do two things: award the congressional candidate who had the most donations– not the most money, the most people donating– a $1,000 Blue America PAC check; and we’ll randomly chose one donor to get the RIAA-certified 311 platinum award pictured above. So, there’s still plenty of time for you to “vote.” You do it here.

Although it’s close enough so that it could go any way, the two leaders right now are Nick Ruiz, who’s running in central Florida against Republican anti-Social Security reactionary John Mica, and Pennsylvania state Senator Daylin Leach, who’s running for the open congressional seat being abandoned by New Dem Allyson Schwartz in northeast Philadelphia. All the statements are on the page but here are the two that have the most votes so far.

Daylin:

“At a time when corporate profits, executive compensation, the stock market and wealth disparity are at near record highs, it is obscene to even consider balancing our budget on the backs of seniors and veterans. I fully supported President Obama’s election, but I can’t support any drift towards corporatism to appease tea-party extremists. If we are really serious about ensuring the solvency of Social Security while preserving benefits well into the future, there is a simple solution. We should raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax from $110,000 per year to $200,000 per year. This is fair, reasonable, and keeps faith with those who rely on Social Security to survive.”

And Nick:

“I would never vote to diminish Social Security benefits. These benefits cover retirees, widows, children, disabled persons and veterans– none of whom receive enough as it is by current economic standards of reasonable cost, inflation and common decency. In fact, it’s part of my platform to actually increase Social Security benefits, financed by lifting the FICA cap, and Wall Street cost-sharing. My GOP opponent, John Mica wants to CUT Social Security benefits and make seniors retire even later in life, at 70 years of age. It’s unacceptable. Help me stop him.”

Just a handful of “votes” separate these two– and separate them from the other candidates. So, please don’t forget to vote before 6AM tomorrow. Again, here’s where you can do it— a place where one dollar counts as much as $100.

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Meanwhile in America’s terrorist prison camp

by digby

This is happening.  Right now.

A week after a raid that put Guantanamo Bay’s largest and most communal prison camp under lockdown, the number of detainees the U.S. military says are participating in a 10-week-long hunger strike has grown to 63 of the 166 men held at the camp — more than one-third of the men incarcerated there, according to the Defense Department.

Just a week ago, the Pentagon’s official tally was 42 men on hunger strike at the prison camp.

Fifteen of the hunger strikers are currently being force-fed liquid nutrients, “to preserve life or prevent serious self-harm,” said Guantanamo spokesman Capt. Robert Durand. The process involves a detainee being strapped to a chair and having Ensure poured into a plastic tube that runs down his nose and throat.

In the past eight days, Durand said two detainees had tried to commit suicide by hanging themselves. The U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the Navy base in southern Cuba, has designated seven of the nine detainee deaths at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002 as suicides.

The military commander at Guantanamo, Rear Admiral John Smith, ordered the early morning April 13 raid on Camp Six, because guards could no longer see inside the facility, Durand said. Detainees had covered up 147 of the 160 security cameras and hung sheets blocking the guards’ view of the common areas.
[…]
Last Saturday’s raid came the day after a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only independent group allowed access to the detainees, departed after three weeks at the base. The ICRC does not comment publicly on its findings, but it opposes force-feedings.

“We raise issues bilaterally to maintain access and hopefully impact the situations we work from within,” said ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno.

Captain Durand disputed an Op-Ed column by detainee Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel published April 15 in the New York Times stating two detainees now weighed less than 100 pounds.

“None of the new hunger strikers has gone below 100 pounds,” Durand said. He said one detainee who has been hunger striking for years did drop to 90 pounds last year but recently weighed 120 pounds.

In a Washington federal court on Monday, detainee attorneys lost a motion seeking an order for the military to cease what the lawyers claim is retaliation against hunger strikers, such as allegedly depriving them of clean drinking water and keeping cells at chilly temperatures. The claims have been made by detainees, including Moqbel, in statements via their attorneys.

The motion was filed on behalf of hunger-striking detainee Masaab Omar al-Madhwani, 32, from Yemen, who says he has refused food and for more than a month.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan denied the motion.

“The court wrongly ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to provide any of the requested relief,” said attorney Mari Newman, from Denver, who represents al-Madhwani and four other detainees.

“Judge Hogan’s ruling that the courts have no jurisdiction to order humanitarian and life-saving relief for Mr. al-Madhwani is yet another blow in an unbroken record of every branch of our government abdicating responsibility for lives of the innocent men that it has tortured and imprisoned for over a decade,” Newman said.

Newman and other detainee attorneys say, besides discontent over more invasive cell inspections, the underlying cause of the hunger strike is indefinite detention without charges coupled with the knowledge that half the detainees have been approved for transfer but are not leaving.

“I have no reason to believe that I will ever leave this prison alive,” Madhwani stated in a written declaration. “Indefinite detention is the worst form of torture. I am an innocent man. I have never done anything against the United States, and I never would.”

“You can understand why people are going on a hunger strike if they feel like they have no other option,” said Zeke Johnson, Director of Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights Campaign.

Yeah. Being held in prison despite the fact that they know you are innocent may be the greatest long term psychological torture there is. (To me, anyway — living with that kind of injustice is just unimaginable.)

But it isn’t just psychological torture. It’s physical torture. And it’s been going on at Guantanamo from the beginning:

The stories coming out of Gitmo are remarkably consistent. This is not an unusual case. Indeed, the attempted suicide rate down there is astronomical, but after this was publicized, in a typical Bushian move, they have decided to simply give attempted suicidee another, less disturbing, name. From the Vanity Fair article:

In the camp’s acute ward, a young man lies chained to his bed, being fed protein-and-vitamin mush through a stomach tube inserted via a nostril. “He’s refused to eat 148 consecutive meals,” says Dr. Louis Louk, a naval surgeon from Florida. “In my opinion, he’s a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesn’t get his way.” Why is he shackled? “I don’t want any of my guys to be assaulted or hurt,” he says.

By the end of September 2003, the official number of suicide attempts by inmates was 32, but the rate has declined recently-not because the detainees have stopped trying to hang themselves but because their attempts have been reclassified. Gitmo has apparently spawned numerous cases of a rare condition: “manipulative self-injurious behavior,” or S.I.B. That, says chief surgeon Captain Stephen Edmondson, means “the individual’s state of mind is such that they did not sincerely want to end their own life.” Instead, they supposedly thought they could get better treatment, perhaps even obtain release. In the last six months, there have been 40 such incidents.

Also too, from 2007:

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive. 

They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp’s chief doctor, seen by The Observer.

‘Experience teaches us’ that such symptoms must be expected ‘whenever nasogastric tubes are used,’ says the affidavit of Captain John S Edmondson, commander of Guantánamo’s hospital. The procedure – now standard practice at Guantánamo – ‘requires that a foreign body be inserted into the body and, ideally, remain in it.’ But staff always use a lubricant, and ‘a nasogastric tube is never inserted and moved up and down. It is inserted down into the stomach slowly and directly, and it would be impossible to insert the wrong end of the tube.’ Medical personnel do not insert nasogastric tubes in a manner ‘intentionally designed to inflict pain.’ 

It is painful, Edmonson admits. Although ‘non-narcotic pain relievers such as ibuprofen are usually sufficient, sometimes stronger drugs,’ including opiates such as morphine, have had to be administered…

Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which US doctors are legally bound to observe through their membership of the American Medical Association, states that doctors must not undertake force-feeding under any circumstances. Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at Queen Elizabeth’s hospital in Birmingham, is co-ordinating opposition to the Guantánamo doctors’ actions from the international medical community. ‘If I were to do what Edmondson describes in his statement, I would be referred to the General Medical Council and charged with assault,’ he said.

I’ll take a leap and assume that the treatment of hunger striking prisoners  has improved since 2007. But it’s still a form of torture. And the way to end it should be simple: release these innocent prisoners who have been charged with no crime. Our inability to do the obvious is completely irrational.

*And, by the way, we really do have to blame the neanderthal caucus in the congress and their timorous brethren in the Democratic party for continuing this insane policy. The administration is hamstrung on this one. On the other hand, they can certainly instruct their people in Guantanamo to go to extreme lengths to operate humanely — since most of the people in it aren’t terrorists.

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Sobering factoids ‘o the day

by digby

Even in the midst of panic, Chris Hayes did a marvelous job contextualizing the Boston bombings last week by comparing it to our reaction to the epidemic of gun violence. The statistics were a shocker.

Michael Cohen takes the same approach in this column today and offers up these numbers which sent a chill down my spine:

The same day of the marathon bombing in Boston, 11 Americans were murdered by guns. The pregnant Breshauna Jackson was killed in Dallas, allegedly by her boyfriend. In Richmond, California, James Tucker III was shot and killed while riding his bicycle – assailants unknown. Nigel Hardy, a 13-year-old boy in Palmdale, California, who was being bullied in school, took his own life. He used the gun that his father kept at home. And in Brooklyn, New York, an off-duty police officer used her department-issued Glock 9mm handgun to kill herself, her boyfriend and her one-year old child.

At the same time that investigators were in the midst of a high-profile manhunt for the marathon bombers that ended on Friday evening, 38 more Americans – with little fanfare – died from gun violence. One was a 22-year old resident of Boston. They are a tiny percentage of the 3,531 Americans killed by guns in the past four months – a total that surpasses the number of Americans who died on 9/11 and is one fewer than the number of US soldiers who lost their lives in combat operations in Iraq.

We are obviously stimulated by the fear that terrorism presents. It brings us all together in a way we crave. Look at the cheers heard all over Boston — and I’d guess all over the country — when they finally caught the suspect. (I too felt the euphoria, but for another reason — he was alive, which seemed to me to show an admirable restraint on the part of our law enforcement and made me feel as if despite the obvious emotion the event had caused, our authorities hadn’t completely abandoned our principles. And I’m afraid very few people would have asked any questions if they had killed the suspect.)

Clearly, this fear has to do with “the other” not with the violence. It must. The level of violence we are living with every day —  and which a large number of Americans defend as the cost of liberty — proves it.

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Answering Bush’s Question

by tristero

NY Times:

More than four years after leaving office, former President George W. Bush has a question for America: So what would you have done?

In a new brick-and-limestone museum, visitors to an interactive theater will be presented with the stark choices that confronted the nation’s 43rd president: invade Iraq or leave Saddam Hussein in power? Deploy federal troops after Hurricane Katrina or rely on local forces? Bail out Wall Street or let the banks fail? 

The answer is simple: Hire people who can frame better questions. 

One example:

“Invading Iraq” versus “leaving Saddam in power” is a classic false dichotomy – as if it was so black and white, as if there were no other choices.  The question as Bush framed it is too loaded to be useful.The sensible question back then was,

What are the best responses, in terms of the United States’ self-interest, to the regional and global problems caused by the Saddam Hussein regime?

When you put it that way, the notion of invading Iraq clearly looks like the stupidest idea since, well, since dismissing the pre-9/11 intelligence that bin Laden was determined to strike the US. And it’s equally obvious that to “leave Saddam in power”is a ludicrously simplistic and misleading formulation, implying among other absurd things, that Saddam served as leader of Iraq only at the pleasure of the US government).

And what were alternatives? Well, there were many that fell under the rubric of “regime change.” They weren’t perfect by any means – sanctions fell very hard on the Iraqi people, for example. But they were much more clearly in US’s interest than Bush’s misbegotten invasion.

As his latest exercise in egomania demonstrates, the Bush administration asked the wrong questions. Over and over again.

And then proceeded to address them with the worst possible answers. Over and over again.

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How we see them and how they see us

by digby

This is interesting. Dylan Matthews and colleague Kimberly Gross did some polling a few years back on attitudes toward Muslims and the GWOT. I might have hoped that this would have changed in the ensuing years but the reactions during the Boston bomber chase indicate it hasn’t. (This Chuck Woolery twitter stream is a great example, but if you watched Fox news at all last week it was on vivid display.)

[O]n average these respondents rated both Muslims and Muslim-Americans as more violent than peaceful and as more untrustworthy than trustworthy. Put in percentage terms, 45 percent of respondents placed Muslim-Americans on the “violent” side of the scale, and 51 percent placed Muslims on this side of the scale. Given that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was an American citizen, it is notable that respondents do not appear to distinguish between Muslims and Muslim-Americans. Both groups are stereotyped in much the same way.

At the same time, Muslims and Muslim-Americans were perceived as more hardworking than lazy and as more intelligent than unintelligent. Gross and I argue that this pattern fits the prevailing images of Muslims that Americans are exposed to in the news and entertainment media. Muslims are portrayed, intentionally or not, as devious and violent more often than they are portrayed as lazy or dumb.

These surveys suggest that many Americans do not distinguish between the vast majority of peaceful Muslims and the very small number of Muslims who commit violent acts, as Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are alleged to have done. This is true even though many political leaders have made precisely this distinction. (George W. Bush’s address to Congress after 9/11 is eloquent on this point.) Instead, these Americans paint with a broader brush, believing that “Muslims” tend to be violent and untrustworthy.

In a forthcoming article, Gross and I show that these stereotypes are consequential.

Even after accounting for other factors, people with negative stereotypes of Muslims on the peaceful-violent and trustworthy-untrustworthy dimensions were more likely to support various aspects of the War on Terror. (The paper also goes some distance to address the opposite possibility: that support of the War on Terror preceded any negative stereotypes of Muslims.) The phrase “more likely” is important: these results merely describe a tendency. It is certainly not true that everyone who supports the War on Terror has negative views of Muslims.

Nevertheless, stereotypes of Muslims appear to be an important ingredient in how Americans think about policies targeted at terrorism. The Boston marathon bombing is likely only to reinforce this.

I’m going to take a wild, and no doubt controversial, guess that many of the people who support the drone strikes are driven by similar impulses. It’s what comes from seeing “muslims” as some sort of lethal super-race bent on our total destruction who must be met with deadly force or risk annihilation.

And yet, imagine how the Afghan and Pakistani Muslims see us:

and this, of course:

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Speaking of human rights

by digby

Why is this considered a substitute for a gun anymore?

Montgomery County police were called to the 8800 block of Cross Country Place just after 6 p.m. for a report of a man acting strangely.

The caller told to the 911 that an man in his 30’s was standing in a parked pick-up truck. The caller reported that the man was yelling profanities, striking the truck with rocks and crawling on other vehicles.

When the first officer arrived, he found the man in the bed of the truck. He then left the pick-up truck and jumped to the roof of an SUV next to the truck. The officer ordered the man down from the SUV and he jumped off but continued to act aggressively, according to police.

After the the man did not comply with the officer’s instructions, the officer used pepper spray and the man ran away. He then picked up and dropped a potted plant and a landscaping rock, said police in a statement.

The man then approached the front door of a nearby home. He picked up a child’s scooter and used it to strike the front door of the residence. Additional officers arrived at the scene and ordered him off the home’s front porch.

“Two officers approached the subject and deployed tasers while he was on the front porch of this residence,” says Montgomery County Police Captain Paul Starks.

Additional officers restrained the man with handcuffs but noticed he was not breathing. They requested Fire and Rescue backup and began administering CPR.

Here’s the videotape:

DC Breaking Local News Weather Sports FOX 5 WTTG

Who could ever have predicted than an obese, middle aged man might not survive 50,000 volts of electricity?

I get that this is a frustrating situation. The fellow was obviously uncooperative and suffering from mental illness or under the influence of drugs. But tasers aren’t the answer unless you think that it’s ok to kill people on the spot for being uncooperative with police while holding a tricycle.

 I’m going to guess that a whole lot of people in this country do believe that. But they should think twice. It’s very likely that a friend, family member or even the individual himself could have a mental breakdown at some point, or find themselves out of their right minds for any number of reasons. They shouldn’t be subject to the death penalty on the spot because of that. It’s a very common part of the human condition.

h/t to Thomas Soldan

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Saturday Night at the Movies 

I’m beginning to worry about Toni Collette. While I realize that she is an actor (and a damn fine one) who is playing a seriously unhinged character in P.J. Hogan’s Mental, it’s just that she’s played these seriously unhinged characters so frequently, and with such unflagging gusto, I am starting to wonder if this woman really is off her fucking rocker. And if she is, know that I’m not judging; after all, that’s what made the late great Jonathan Winters such a comedic genius (he actually did have a few screws loose…may he R.I.P.).

In this outing, Collette (who made her bones with movie audiences as Hogan’s leading lady in his wildly popular 1994 Australian import, Muriel’s Wedding) plays a Nanny from Hell named Shaz (think Mary Poppins meets Courtney Love). She hitchhikes into a New South Wales burg, accompanied by her trusty dog, Ripper. She’s picked up by Barry Moochmore (Anthony LaPaglia), an exasperated father of five daughters. He is at wit’s end, because his wife Shirley (Rebecca Gibney) who has a history of mental issues, believes that she is Maria von Trapp (in the opening, she serenades the neighbors and horrifies her kids by belting out a lively rendition of “The Sound of Music” while hanging laundry). Consequently, Barry, an ambitious politician, has sent his wife “on holiday” (the laughing house) on the eve of a campaign. What to do about his daughters?

For unfathomable reasons beyond the ken of any halfway responsible parent, Barry (who apparently spends so little quality time with his family that he can’t keep all his daughters’ names straight) offers the off-the-wall Shaz a gig as the family nanny. With his wife tucked away under psychiatric observation and his children under possibly psychotic supervision by a total stranger, Barry can now get back on track with his true passions: philandering and politicking. Needless to say, this highly dysfunctional home environment has imbued the Moochmore sisters with assorted neuroses of their own; but as we’ve learned from similar (and superior) films like Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping and Eugene Corr’s Desert Bloom, it’s nothing that the Kooky Free Spirited Auntie can’t cure with a few wacky bonding escapades and “just between us girls” heart-to-heart sessions.

A wild pastiche of general hysteria, screeching actors, busy sets and loud colors, Mental is a cacophonous, anxiety-inducing assault on the senses. Hogan told an interviewer that the story is loosely autobiographical, that there really was a “Shaz” who played a similar role in his childhood. That’s nice to know, but why turn such a potentially interesting personal memoir into what amounts to a live action Saturday morning cartoon?  Now that I think about it, it is not unlike a Pedro Almodovar film; except Almodovar seems to know when to put a sock in it and allow his narrative to breathe a bit. While there’s something to be said for quirk, ebullience and verve (of which this film certainly has no shortage), Hogan refuses to let viewers up for air, leaving us to drown in his enthusiasm.

Yin-yang: Upstream Color

You know all those Weekly World News-type stories about people allegedly kidnapped by aliens, who perform horrible experiments on their hapless captives before returning them to their original upright position behind the wheel of their car, now mysteriously relocated in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in Iowa? While they may have vague recollections regarding anal probes and such, these folks are generally a bit fuzzy on details. In Upstream Color, writer-director-actor Shane Carruth may be offering an explanation. At least that’s one explanation that I can offer for this fuzzy cypher of a film.

To say this film is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma is understatement. To say that it redefines the meaning of “Huh?!” may be more apt. A woman (Amy Seimitz) is jumped in an alley, tasered and then forced to ingest a creepy-crawly whatsit (all I know is that it appears to be in its larval stage) that puts her into a docile and suggestible state. Her kidnapper however turns out to be not so much Buffalo Bill, but more Terence McKenna (I believe the original working title of this film was When Ethnobotanists Attack!) As he methodically cleans out her financial assets over a period of several days (with her “willing” cooperation) while encamped at her house, he next directs her to commit passages of Thoreau’s writings to memory (it was either that or waterboarding).  

What happens next is…well, what happens next is, erm…OK we’ll just say it’s the creepy, fuzzily recollected part involving anal probes and such. All I know is that it takes place at a pig farm and fuzzily reminded me of that really creepy part of O Lucky Man! wherein Malcolm McDowell inadvertently stumbles into a top secret government medical research lab, where he’s tortured and then the next thing he knows he’s coming to on a gurney next to some poor wretched creature that appears to be half man and half sheep.  Anyhoo, the next thing the woman knows, she’s back behind the wheel of her car, parked alongside some cornfield off the interstate, and spends the rest of the movie slowly retrieving memories of her bizarre experience in bits and pieces. Oh, and along the way she meets and falls in love with this sullen dude (played by Carruth) who may have had the same exact experience! Wild and wooly metaphysical/transcendentalist hijinks ensue.

While I will give Carruth some points for originality (the closest I can come to a tagline for this one is A Man and a Woman meets Eraserhead ) and find it admirable that he is making such an earnest effort to be compared to Andrei Tartovsky, unfortunately he’s falling short, just this side of a glorified Twilight Zone episode. This seems to be the latest entry in a burgeoning subgenre that I have dubbed “emo sci-fi” (alongside the likes of Another Earth and Safety Not Guaranteed). That being said, if you are predisposed toward such challenging fare, I wouldn’t dissuade you from checking it out. And don’t feel bad if you don’t “get it” the first time you see it. I didn’t get it the second time either.

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

Chechy whatever. They’re all foreigners aren’t they?

by digby

It’s hard to believe this is necessary, but apparently it is:

As many I was deeply shocked by the tragedy that occurred in Boston earlier this month. It was a stark reminder of the fact that any of us could be a victim of senseless violence anywhere at any moment.

As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities — the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.

As the President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman noted in his message to President Obama, the Czech Republic is an active and reliable partner of the United States in the fight against terrorism. We are determined to stand side by side with our allies in this respect, there is no doubt about that.

Petr Gandalovič
Ambassador of the Czech Republic

Sheesh. I don’t know who the bozos are that don’t know the difference but as an American please allow me to express my apologies on their behalf.

Unfortunately, we’re dismantling our education system so this is unlikely to be the last time something embarrassing like this happens. I apologize in advance to those who will have to put up with it.

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They’re getting the Benghazi band back together

by digby

And they’re playing the same old tune:

In a joint statement on Saturday by Graham and McCain and fellow Republicans Senator Kelly Ayotte and Congressman Peter King, they said: “The suspect, based upon his actions, clearly is a good candidate for enemy combatant status. We do not want this suspect to remain silent … We should be focused on gathering intelligence from this suspect right now that can help our nation understand how this attack occurred and what may follow. That should be our focus, not a future domestic criminal trial that may take years to complete.”

“We do not want this suspect to remain silent.” How do they expect to make sure he doesn’t, I wonder? After all, the Miranda warning is designed to let suspects know that whatever they say could be used against them at trial. But staying “silent” is something that each individual chooses to do or not do based upon his own willingness to cooperate with authorities. And if they don’t want to cooperate, we don’t believe those authorities can “make them”. These government officials seem to think that as an “enemy combatant” they can. And the legal rulings on these matters over the years have big enough holes to drive a truck through if they choose to do it.

It should be noted that the Obama administration retired the “enemy combatant”  phrase some time ago.  It doesn’t have a clear legal definition and is now more or less a political term of art. But they did not discard the underlying logic:

Tom Parker, Amnesty International advocacy director for terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights, said, “It’s symbolically significant that he’s dropped the term ‘enemy combatant,’ but the power to detain individuals within the ‘indefinite detention without charge’ paradigm remains substantially intact.”

The legal filing is the latest signal that Obama’s team is not radically departing from many of the terrorism-related legal policies of the previous administration. Late Thursday, it urged an appeals court to reject a lawsuit brought by four Britons who alleged they were tortured at Guantanamo. In another case, involving the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which alleges it was the target of illegal government electronic surveillance, Justice Department lawyers have asserted defenses similar to those made under President George W. Bush.

The Obama administration’s legal changes came under pressure from federal judges, who are presiding over lawsuits brought by about 200 detainees. The detainees won the right to challenge their confinements in a landmark Supreme Court ruling last year.

The Justice Department had recently argued it wanted to take a case-by-case approach to applying definitions.

But the judges said that was not fair to the detainees and their attorneys, especially because full-blown hearings could begin as soon as next month.

“The definition of the central legal term ‘enemy combatant’ is not a moving target, varying from case to case, and the court intends to rule on that definition before the parties reach a critical point in these proceedings,” Judge John D. Bates wrote in a February order seeking the Justice Department’s definition. At least two other judges had requested the government to provide them with the same definition by yesterday.

Another judge, Richard J. Leon, last year applied the “enemy combatant” definition used by the military, which required officials to find only that a detainee supported the Taliban, al-Qaeda or associated groups.

He has ordered that six detainees be freed but that four others can remain in custody. In one case, he ruled that preparing meals for the Taliban was enough to justify continued detention. It is not clear how the Obama administration’s new standard will affect detainees in similar situations.

This was later clarified a bit by the 2012 Defense authorization bill, and not in a good way:

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Codifying Chateau d’If

by digby

I think one of the most stunning aspects of the administration’s decision not to veto an historic expansion of government power to imprison even its own citizens indefinitely and without due process is the context. Sure, we live in a very dangerous world. But we’ve been living in one at least since the advent of of The Bomb and the last I heard we were picking off Ad Qaeda members three at a time. The fact that this is happening with the war in Iraq wound down and Afghanistan scheduled to do so as well is what’s odd.

Ginny Sloan of the Constitution Project put it well:

But what will we say to future generations if the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) becomes law? That legislation contains a provision that authorizes the president to indefinitely imprison, without a criminal charge or court hearing, any suspected terrorist who is captured within the United States — including American citizens.

It is difficult to imagine a greater attack on one of the most basic of individual freedoms protected by our great Constitution. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.”

If members of Congress choose — for the first time in our nation’s history — to codify a system of indefinite detention without charge and authorize such confinement on the basis of suspicion alone, they will do so with their eyes wide open. The attacks of 9/11 are now more than ten years old. Although our troops are still engaged in Afghanistan, the fog of war has long since lifted.

Indefinite detention will now be law, not some emergency measure that history will judge to have been a mistake made in a crisis. It is a well thought out codification of certain views that have become commonplace in American society — that “terrorists” (to be defined by whomever sits in the White House) are not to be allowed the due process allowed to other human beings because our government just *knows* they are so dangerous we cannot even take the chance that they won’t be found guilty. That turns the rule of law on its head.

Adam Serwer has been following this story for Mother Jones and described the “changes” this way:

The conference version of the bill gives the White House so much room to maneuver around the “mandatory” nature of the military detention provisions that Congress can argue they’ve given the administration the “flexibility” it needs to fight terrorism effectively. At the same time, the bill creates a presumption of military custody for foreign nationals suspected of terrorism where there was none before.

That means next time a foreign national gets pulled off a plane with their underpants on fire, and the administration doesn’t throw him in a brig somewhere, elected officials can run to the microphones and express their frustration that the White House is defying congressional will.

I think that’s a long shot, don’t you? What administration is not going to simply throw them in the brig rather than “defy congressional will” and try them in a civilian court? It won’t happen.

Instead, we will see “terrorists” (however they’re defined) disappeared into a military justice system indefinitely, just as those Gitmo prisoners, many of them innocent of any serious crime, have been left to moulder in prison basically forever. As Serwer noted, “the transfer restrictions effectively turn Gitmo into the Chateu d’If.” (I have used the same reference many times, calling it “The Count of Monte Cristo effect.”)

The horror of indefinite detention, often in solitary confinement by capricious decision with no due process is one of the greater horrors of the imagination (to me anyway.) Consider what we’ve already done:

One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston,South Carolina.

That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

[…]

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”

“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”

Padilla was famously thrown back into the civilian system when the Supreme Court overruled the decision under which he had been held in those conditions. The damage had already been done. Indefinite detention, particularly with solitary confinement, for anyone, American or not, is a form of torture.

I think dday’s analysis of why this happened is probably correct:

Remember that the White House has little problem with indefinite military detention. They just want to be able to dictate when it gets used and on whom. So they obviously see enough flexibility here to carry out unconstrained intelligence gathering and detention policies.

The part at the end, where they hope and pray that Congress will go back and fix the bill if it ever becomes a problem, is just nonsense. And the bill overall is ripe for abuse. The White House simply didn’t want to take the political hit for vetoing a bill that “supports the troops.” And they weren’t aroused enough by the thought of indefinite military detentions to mount any serious opposition to it.

The status quo remains in practice and the symbolism of codifying indefinite detention is probably a price they are willing to pay. The word is that the National Security types were overruled by the political people, but at the end of the day the only people who are worried about this for the long term are a bunch of shrill civil libertarians who are watching some very basic human rights and constitutional principles be eroded even years after the fog of war has cleared.

And those of you who trust that the Obama administration will not misuse this discretion should not be soothed. This law will remain on the books long after he is gone. How do you suppose the first Tea Party president will interpret it?

I was very sure that no administration would find it in their interest to defy the sort of bloodlust that usually permeates these debates. But I’m hopeful that I’m wrong this time. When he signed this bill the president said:

“I have signed the Act chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed . . . I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

The one thing this suspect has going for him is that he’s a legitimately naturalized citizen which, while it should have no bearing on anything (the constitution applies to everyone on American soil), which means that while they can throw him in prison indefinitely under section 1021, they cannot try him by military tribunal. They still need to be mindful of the normal rule of law, even if he’s called an “enemy combatant” (a term that has no legal meaning — the Obama administration doesn’t use it) if they hope to have a trial and a resolution. So, we live in hope.

On the other hand, he does have a ferrin sounding name and he wan’t born here — and the national security psycho caucus obviously doesn’t find the fact of his citizenship to be a hindrance, so who knows?

This is going to be a big test of the Obama administration. I’m fervently hoping they do the right thing here. Their early endorsement of an indefinite detention policy is worrisome, but I’m hopeful they wil understand that they simply must come down on the right side of this one for the sake of out constitutional foundation.

*Oh, and by the way: JJ McCain, the flyboy POW, obviously sold his soul to Satan somewhere along the line. This is a low point, even for him.

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Guns for the needy

by digby

No really:

In a city still reeling from a shooting rampage that killed six and severely injured a congresswoman, contrasting giveaways are being proposed for a handful of its working-class neighborhoods.

One would dole out free shotguns to poor adults. Another would hand out free school supplies to needy children.
[…]
Shaun McClusky, a real estate agent who lives in the Tucson area, said he heard about the Armed Citizen Project and contacted the group’s leader, Kyle Coplen, a post-graduate student in Houston. Coplen’s initiative has raised about $13,000 to purchase shotguns that would be distributed in seven cities, perhaps more.

Recipients will have to pass a background check and will be given special training before receiving a free shotgun.

“It’s about home protection,” McClusky said. “If you are a single mom or dad and can’t afford a shotgun, we’ll give one to you.”

In response, local activist Sal Baldenegro Jr. is spearheading the School Supply Giveaway campaign, and hopes to raise at least as much, if not more, money than McClusky.

“Tucson residents are working hard to make our neighborhoods safe, but free gun giveaways completely undermine this effort,” Baldenegro states in a website for online donations. Handing out school supplies, he adds, “will result in a vibrant and healthy Tucson community.”

Joseph Miller, Midvale Park Assn. president, said his neighborhood doesn’t need “gun welfare.”

And he makes an excellent point:

“Nobody’s going to want to move into a place where they’re giving out free guns,” he said.

Dead bodies are definitely an eyesore.

I’m going to guess that Mr McClusky is yet another cocky gun proliferation activist who just wants to make a political point. And I’ll take it one step further and speculate that he is one of those fine fellows who thinks that half the population are freeloaders who need to stop their whining, get off their hind ends and get a (better paying) job instead of asking other people to support them. Needless to say however, giving them a free gun is the Christian thing to do.

h/t to Colleen Kirby

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