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The Obama administration has said that it wants to create a “truly civil detention system.” Orwellian or earnest? Aarti Shahani founder of Families for Freedom and lead author of the Justice Strategies report, “Local Democracy on ICE” discusses the Obama administration’s plan and the closure of the T. Don Hutto detention center in Texas.

Is it possible that the Obama administration’s attempt to prosecute the crimes of the Bush administration could actually be worse than doing nothing? That’s what Andrew Sullivan concluded in response to an LA Times article suggesting that Holder will prosecute only those who went beyond the parameters outlined by the Bush administration torture memos. “This strikes me as the very very worst of all possible worlds,” writes Sullivan, “- the kind of split-the-difference pragmatism that will end up alienating everyone.”
Scott Horton, Contributing Editor at Harper’s Magazine, Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Vijay Padmanabhan, former US State Department Lawyer and a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law on the Justice Department decision.

No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as the result of mistreatment. In the first case, an unnamed detainee under C.I.A. supervision in Afghanistan froze to death after having been chained, naked, to a concrete floor overnight. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. In the second case, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. A third prisoner died after an interrogation in which a C.I.A. officer participated, though the officer evidently did not cause the death. (Several other detainees have disappeared and remain unaccounted for, according to Human Rights Watch.)

Raw Story reports:

A judge in Niagra County, New York, ruled Thursday that DNA evidence, obtained only after police applied a Taser to a suspect who refused to provide evidence against himself, may be used by the prosecution because the electric shock was not administered with malice. Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza, with this 17-page decision, becomes “the first judge in western civilization to say you can use a Taser to enforce a court order,” defense attorney Patrick Balkin said, according to The Niagara Gazette.
“Note that if Smith is guilty, he’s a pretty bad guy,” interjected The Buffalo News. “He’s charged with shooting a man in the groin after invading his ex-girlfriend’s home, tying up her two children and forcing her to take her to the home of the man he shot. He’s also charged with the shotgun-point robbery of a Niagara Falls gas station. DNA was found at both crime scenes.”
Smith, according to reports, had previously agreed to a court order for a DNA sample. But when authorities accidentally spoiled the sample, forcing them to return to the judge for a second order Sperrazza issued it without consulting the defense counsel, thinking the defendant would not mind.
“Smith did object, reportedly telling officers, ‘I ain’t giving it up. You’re going to have to tase me,’” added Buffalo News.
“Which they did, after consulting with a prosecutor, who either told them to use ‘the minimum force necessary’ (according to police testimony at last month’s court hearing) or ‘any means necessary’ (according to a police report written the day of the incident).”
After tasing Smith, a DNA swab was taken without consent.
“They have now given the Niagara Falls police discretion to Taser anybody anytime they think it’s reasonable,” Smith’s attorney said, according to a separate report in The Buffalo News. “Her decision says you can enforce a court order by force. If you extrapolate that, we no longer have to have child support hearings; you can just Taser the parent.”
In the decision’s text, Sperrazza cited a Wyoming case in which a judge ruled police acted legally when they tased a man in order to force him to open his hand relative to a search.
“The Court is certainly concerned that the purpose of the Taser was to inflict pain, and has seriously considered the argument of the defendant that a line is crossed when such government action is sanctioned,” she wrote. “This Court would immediately condemn and sanction the actions of the police if there was any indication that the Taser was used maliciously, or to an excessive extent, or with resulting injury. The Court is convinced by the evidence presented that the exact opposite of those factors was present in this case.
“The court would not advice the government to systematically utilize pain compliance as a standard tool in future similar circumstances, because of the intense scrutiny the use of such tactics would receive from this Court. However, this case is perhaps best described as the ‘perfect storm’ where the crimes being investigated were egregious, the evidence sought highly probative, the intrusion was minimal, and with a subject who steadfastly refused to comply with a lawful court Order. Further, the officers, armed with the Order issued, repeatedly sought the subject’s compliance, explored alternative methods of obtaining the sample, repeatedly warned the defendant of the consequences of his refusal and took steps to minimize the pain inflicted and the potential for injury. There was no malice or desire to injure the defendant.

The argument is very familiar to teh justification that we used to torture

A great-grandmother from the Hill Country has taken on legal representation after being tasered and jailed for resisting arrest.

Last Monday, 72-year-old Kathryn Winkfein was driving home to Granite Schoals after her bi-weekly shopping trip to Austin when she was pulled over by a Travis County Constable deputy. According to authorities, she'd been doing 60 down a 45-mph construction zone on Highway 71 near Bee Creek.

The officer wrote out a ticket to Winkfein and asked her to sign the stub, explaining that her signature wasn't an admission of guilt, but rather a promise to show up for a future court appearance. Winkfein, allegedly belligerent over the matter, refused to sign and asked the officer to take her to jail.

Further exacerbating the situation, Winkfein then got out of her car and proceeded to direct a litany of choice curse words towards the officer, who at that point told her that she would indeed be going to jail. Winkfein became violent, according to the officer, leaving him no choice but to zap the elderly lady her with his taser.

Winkfein was sent to Travis County Jail and booked for resisting arrest and detention. When interviewed by Fox 7 News, she dismissed the official report as being untrue.

"I wasn't argumentative, I was not combative," she said. "This is a lie. All of this is a lie, pulled away from him I did not."

A spokesman for the Constable office backed up the behavior of the arresting officer, saying that the use of a taser on Winkfein was appropriate.

While fiercely loyal establishment spokespeople such as The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus continue to insist that prosecutions are only appropriate for common criminals ("someone breaking into your house") but not our glorious political leaders when they break the law (by, say, systematically torturing people), the Bush administration has righteously decided that torture is such a grotesque and intolerable crime that political leaders who order it simply must be punished in American courts to the fullest extent of the law . . . . if they're from Liberia:

MIAMI (AP) -- U.S. prosecutors want a Miami judge to sentence the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor to 147 years in prison for torturing people when he was chief of a brutal paramilitary unit during his father's reign.
Charles McArthur Emmanuel, also known as Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr. is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 9 by U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga. His conviction was the first use of a 1994 law allowing prosecution in the U.S. for acts of torture committed overseas.

...
Acts which, when ordered by Liberians, are "criminal torture" meriting life imprisonment magically become, when ordered by Americans, mere "aggressive interrogation techniques." And while not all of the "techniques" used by the Liberians were authorized by Bush officials ("hot clothes irons" and "biting ants shoveled onto people's bodies"), many of the authorized American techniques are classic torture tactics and resulted in the deaths of many detainees and the total insanity of many more.
Worse, AP -- with canine-like subservience -- mindlessly recites the Bush administration's excuses (Abu Ghraib was due to low-level rogue bad apples and "there has been no systematic mistreatment of detainees") without even mentioning the ample evidence proving how false those government claims are. That's standard American "journalism" for you: "Our Government says X, and even if it's false and even if it's intensely disputed, we'll just leave it at that." Doing anything more -- as NBC News' David Gregory pointed out -- is "not their role."MORE