IF YOU NEVER READ ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS POST, READ THIS!
The Supreme Court: A User Guide: The Supreme Court matters next election. Seriously. What is it, what does it do exactly and why the hell is it's composition so bloody important to your life this election?
Media & Gov't Torture Cover-up: Sen. Levin, Release the 12/01 SERE Docs
Bush Justice Department politicizes absolutely everything
And why is this so important?
dday at Hullabaloo enlightens us...
Of course, we can all take it for granted that if Obama tries to fire 'em all, the republicans will cream ideological purging, and our waste of space mainstream media will go rrriiigggghhhhtttt along with it. Jesus Lord. It takes so so little time to creat a mess that will reverberate for YEARS!!!!
The Supreme Court: A User Guide: The Supreme Court matters next election. Seriously. What is it, what does it do exactly and why the hell is it's composition so bloody important to your life this election?
The composition of the high court is one of the most important issues at stake in the November election. While the justices cannot bring down gas prices or bring home the troops, their decisions in the coming years will affect just about everything else: your rights regarding privacy, reproduction, speech and religion; how to count your vote and where your kids go to school; as well as your occupational and environmental protections. You name it, they'll decide it. Or they'll decide not to decide it (which may be even worse).
It's easy to convince yourself that who sits on that bench is irrelevant to you because the cases are too complicated to comprehend or too remote to affect your life. But the next president may have the chance to appoint as many as three justices—the constitutional equivalent of a royal flush. Herein, a user's guide to the Supreme Court for you to print out and take to the voting booth (or read at the pool).
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The job description: Since Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803, the justices have had the power of "judicial review," which means (at least in theory) that the court can strike down any law it deems unconstitutional. This may sound somewhat elitist and undemocratic, because these unelected justices have the power to throw out a law even if it is a) popular and b) properly passed by a legislature. Why? Because sometimes duly elected legislatures pass popular but unconstitutional laws. Not everyone currently seated on the bench, though, believes in deploying this constitutional superpower. They would rather have the justices sit at the constitutional kids' table and eat mac and cheese. According to some of these more conservative jurists, judges should refrain from second-guessing the other branches of government in all matters of national security, employment discrimination, health policy, the separation of church and state, free speech, and environmental protection. Never fear. This still leaves the court front and center on critical jurisprudential questions of admiralty law and who gets to sit in the front seat when someone yells "shotgun."
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The stakes: Very high. The conventional wisdom that the Supreme Court is precariously balanced on a knife's edge—with four liberals and four conservatives battling for the heart and mind of swing Justice Anthony Kennedy—may be slightly too simplistic. The current term has now seen enough unanimous and near-unanimous decisions to suggest that last year's narrative of a dug-in 5-4 court is dramatic but probably not quite the whole story. That said, it's clear there are four justices on the bench who mistrust the judiciary in the manner of a Rockette who doesn't much care for dancing. Dissenting in this month's enemy combatants case, Justice Antonin Scalia predicted that judicial overreaching "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." Chief Justice John Roberts added that "unelected, politically unaccountable judges" should not shape detention policy. It's not just bad judges who should not be deciding these claims in their view. Better that no judges oversee them. One more seat at the high court filled by someone who generally believes that jurists cannot be trusted to do much more than wear ascots, will spell the difference between a coequal branch of government and a court that cheers from the bleachers. In ascots.
At the heart of the high court's biggest debates to come—questions about the scope of privacy and claims about presidential secrecy and power—there is a deeper question about the role of courts in this country. So, when you go to the voting booth on Nov. 4, don't think just in terms of which candidate will appoint judges who are "good for women" or "good for property rights." That's terribly important, but it's half the story. For eight years the Bush administration has treated the courts almost like an enemy: meddlers and elitists who cannot understand what it means to be at war. As a consequence, we find ourselves in a country where the rule of law is reduced to an occasional luxury, like heated seats. As you contemplate what you want your next Supreme Court to look like, ask yourself what happens when judges are sidelined—or when they're chosen for their inclination to sideline themselves. If we really want to restore the rule of law in America, and the reputation of the United States as a land in which laws matter, we need to vote for a president who believes that we still call it a Supreme Court for a reason.
Media & Gov't Torture Cover-up: Sen. Levin, Release the 12/01 SERE Docs
Returning then to the New York Times reporting on the Senate hearings, we find this opening statement (emphasis added):
When military officers at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, struggled in the fall of 2002 to find ways to get terrorism suspects to talk, they turned to the one agency that had spent several months experimenting with the limits of physical and psychological pressure: the Central Intelligence Agency.Several months! Mazzetti, Shane, and the New York Times fact-checking office is only off by a factor of 100. Not only has the CIA been studying and "experimenting with the limits of physical and psychological pressure" for year, not months, they have been doing so for over five decades!
It would appear that the mission of the New York Times is to provide limited but essential cover for the intelligence agencies in their work. This means publishing partial truths of particular events, but lying or covering up on all essential matters that could harm the agencies.
The same kind of lying about history -- something akin to the falsification work of George Orwell's "Ministry of Truth -- pops up in Scott Shane's NYT article today on the CIA interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. The article repeats the lie that the CIA in 2002 -- the year that saw the invasion of Afghanistan, the stepped-up campaign to track down and apprehend "terrorists", and the planning for the invasion of Iraq -- was "an agency nearly devoid of expertise in detention and interrogation."
And yet the opposite was true: the CIA had studied the effects of abusive detention and interrogation more than almost any other agency in the government. The results of a multi-million dollar study into coercive interrogation techniques -- centered on a deconstruction of Soviet and Chinese interrogation, and adding in intense research focus on sensory deprivation, sensory overload, and the use of psychotropic drugs -- were brought together as early as 1962 by the CIA into manual form. Anyone who wishes can today read the CIA's "Kubark" manual online and convince themselves of this fact.
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SERE originated in the early 1950s after Air Force pilots captured in the Korean War confessed (or not, depending on whom you wish to believe) to U.S. use of biological weapons on civilian and military targets in that war. The scandal over the pilots' "confessions" (and other pro-communist statements or collaboration by POWs) led to a re-working of the language of the military's "Code of Conduct" and a crash course in the inoculation of American military personnel against so-called Communist" brainwashing".
SERE training contained abusive techniques even from the beginning. A Newsweek article on SERE from September 12, 1955 -- "Ordeal in the Desert: Making Tougher Soldiers to Resist Brainwashing" -- describes the use of isolation, imprisonment in a coffin, electroshock, lies and insults aimed race, religion and national origin, and physical abuse upon Air Force trainees, for the purpose of "stress inoculation." According to Mike Otterman's book, American Torture, brutality within SERE led to a temporary cessation of the program in the mid-1950s.
In the mid-1970s, a SERE student and Navy pilot, Wendell Young, sued the government for millions of dollars, alleging SERE training resulted in abuse and a broken back. He alleged students had been "tortured into spitting, urinating and defecating on the American flag, masturbating before guards, and, on one occasion, engaging in sex with an instructor." The Navy admitted the physical abuse (including "water torture"), but denied the sexual torture. As more was revealed, the deaths of at least two SERE students was reported during what a Navy commander described as training that amounted to "illusions of reality." (See Newsweek article, "Navy's Torture Camp", March 22, 1976 -- of course, this article is not available online, but a reference to the Young case can be found here.)
Bush Justice Department politicizes absolutely everything
Not that we should have needed any further proof of the obvious after AG Gonzales' deputy, Monica Goodling, confessed last May to illegally discriminating in hiring along partisan lines. But now it's official: DOJ hiring committees went to great lengths to exclude Democratic, liberal, and activist job applicants under both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. A new report (PDF) investigates Republican manipulation of the Honors and Interns programs, which together bring new lawyers into DOJ. Ashcroft restructured the programs in 2002 specifically to ensure that more conservatives and fewer liberals were hired. He removed career officials from the hiring committees and replaced them with highly partisan political appointees.
Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used "political or ideological" factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.The DOJ's political elves went to extraordinary lengths to root out what they called "wackos" and "extremists", blackballing applicants for affiliation with such groups as The Nature Conservancy and The American Constitution Society. They invested much time in combing through applicants' backgrounds searching for disqualifying hints of liberalism or the belief that the world might somehow be improved. Even exceptionally distinguished liberal applicants were routinely denied job interviews, whereas mere membership in the Federalist Society was considered sufficient to guarantee an interview. Among the political appointees whom the report rebukes is the rather nasty former counsel to the Associate AG. Monica Goodling had put her in charge of the interview process.
The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what will be a series of investigations growing out of last year’s scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys. It appeared to confirm for the first time in an official examination many of the allegations from critics who charged that the Justice Department had become overly politicized during the Bush administration.
"Many qualified candidates" were rejected for the department’s honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, "constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations."
Esther Slater McDonald..."wrote disparaging statements about the candidates' liberal and Democratic Party affiliations on the applications she reviewed and ... she voted to deselect candidates on that basis," said the report by Inspector General Glenn Fine.
And why is this so important?
dday at Hullabaloo enlightens us...
These are, as is known, violations of federal law. Nothing will be done about it because most of those responsible are already out of government and accountability isn't part of the culture of Washington these days. The real impact will be felt when laws from a Democratic President are not implemented, or a staffer leaks information incriminating the executive or his staff, or any of a thousand options that hardcore right-wing DoJ staffers have to damage the opposition party.
When you fail to engage in the most basic oversight and offer even the threat of punishment, a rogue President and his allies can really do just about anything. You can pass laws and they simply don't get followed. You can consider subpoenas for officials who fail to comply with oversight investigations, and the officials just decline. You can take them to court, but the judge doesn't want to get involved and informs the Congress that they could have solved this on their own anyway:Congress was trying to be diplomatic when it brought an unprecedented lawsuit to settle its subpoena fight against the White House, a lawyer told a federal judge Monday. After all, lawmakers could've just arrested the president's former lawyer for refusing to testify.
The judge's response?
Maybe they should have.
Congress has the authority to hold someone in contempt, U.S. District Judge John Bates said. Did it really need to go to court?
Congress insists on taking most of their bullets out of the chamber and then begging the executive branch to be reasonable, after they have shown no interest in ever doing so. This is how you get the DoJ hiring far-right conservatives and breaking the law with impunity. And getting caught doesn't seem to be an obstacle.
The next four to eight years, should Sen. Obama win, will be littered with "exclusive" stories from inside the DoJ of corruption and politicization and all sorts of malfeasance. These "honor" students are who those charges will be coming from. It'll be a total reversal and somebody had better recognize it.
Of course, we can all take it for granted that if Obama tries to fire 'em all, the republicans will cream ideological purging, and our waste of space mainstream media will go rrriiigggghhhhtttt along with it. Jesus Lord. It takes so so little time to creat a mess that will reverberate for YEARS!!!!