unusualmusic_lj_archive

Scott Horton reports this morning that, in Spain, "prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates [John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Doug Feith and William Haynes] over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo." Spain not only has the right under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture to prosecute foreign officials for torturing its citizens, but it -- like the U.S. -- has the affirmative obligation to do so. (Indeed, the Bush administration itself insisted just last year that the U.S. the right to criminally prosecute foreign officials for ordering acts of torture even in the absence of an accusation that any of the victims were American).
As Hilzoy argues, however, the primary obligation for these prosecutions lies with the country whose officials authorized the war crimes -- the United States:

It is a requirement of law, the law that the Constitution requires Obama, as President, to faithfully execute. He should not outsource his Constitutional obligations to Spain.

That the U.S. has the legal obligation under the U.S. Constitution, our own laws and international treaties to commence criminal investigations is simply undeniable. That is just a fact. Yet it's hard to overstate how far away we are from fulfilling our legal obligations to impose accountability on our own torturers and war criminals.
The barriers to these prosecutions are numerous, but one of the principal obstacles is that CIA Director Leon Panetta has been emphatically demanding that there be no investigations of any government officials whose conduct was declared legal by DOJ lawyers (i.e., the very individuals the Spanish are now investigating for war crimes). And it's not surprising that Panetta has taken this position given that at least two of his top deputies at the CIA are among those implicated, to one degree or another, in the torture regime, as John Sifton detailed earlier this month at The Daily Beast:
...


...the Spanish "advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters." As White points out, that is how war crimes investigations are intended to proceed under numerous treaty provisions by which the U.S. has bound itself: namely, the country whose officials commit the crimes have the primary obligation to investigate and hold the criminals accountable. But other treaty signatories are not only entitled, but required, to commence such proceedings if the violating country refuses or otherwise fails to do so.

Thus, the only way to object to what Spain is doing here is if one: (a) suffers from total ignorance of the basic provisions of Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture; (b) believes that the U.S. has no obligation to abide by its treaties even though the U.S. Constitution provides that such treaties are "the supreme law of the land"; and/or (c) believes that the U.S. need not abide by rules we impose on other countries, such as when we prosecuted other countries' leaders for war crimes in the past. None of those is a particularly noble excuse.MORE

quinacridones

Me, I'm just flabbergasted by today's news. All those things Obama's saying to Detroit, a city of working people left devastated, about sacrifice and restructuring - why isn't he saying them to Wall Street, too?

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Monday will reject requests for almost $22 billion in new taxpayer bailout money for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler, saying the car makers have failed to take steps to ensure their viability.
[...] A senior administration official, briefing reporters late Sunday night on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, said Obama will call for more sacrifice from carmakers, their investors and automotive unions.

Billionaire bankers (and their investors) walk away from the table with their pockets stuffed with taxpayer cash while members of the auto workers union are told they'll have to sacrifice even more - in this case, the Obama administration wants the companies to get rid of "old liabilities" - i.e. retiree pensions. (You know, while bankers complain about having to sell the house in the Hamptons.)
No, Obama's not talking about the insolvent banks. He's talking about Detroit. Could he make it any more obvious that the wealthy are a protected class?

"If they're not willing to make the changes and the restructurings that are necessary, then I'm not willing to have taxpayer money chase after bad money."

Funny, that's just how I feel about Citibank!MORE

Briefs on FISA are coming out in Northern California so fast and furious it's hard to keep them straight. Just as a reminder there are two main cases:

* al-Haramain, in which the Bush (and now Obama) Administration has invoked State Secrets to prevent lawyers for the defunct charity al-Haramain from using clear evidence that Bush wiretapped them illegally to prove that Bush wiretapped them illegally
* Retroactive immunity (Jewel/EFF), in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is challenging the retroactive immunity statute Congress passed last year on Constitutional grounds

The Obama stance on these two cases is worth looking at in conjunction because the Obama position toward congressionally-passed law is perfectly crafted to gut civil liberties (and Article III authority), all based on Obama's interpretation of "if."

Astoundingly, both al-Haramain and retroactive immunity are almost certainly headed for the Appeals Court to rule on the meaning of two "if's" (and one "shall") appearing in FISA-related law. MORE

Warren Richey at the Christian Science Monitor described the legal showdown over Bagram Prison in Afghanistan on Feb. 11:

At the height of its operation, the terror detention camp at Guantánamo was viewed as a legal black hole, a place where Al Qaeda suspects could be held and questioned beyond the glare of judicial scrutiny.
President Obama has made the closing of the detention facility a priority. But as Guantánamo is being drawn down, large-scale construction is under way at a US military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.
-- snip --
At the heart of a looming legal showdown at Bagram is the same fundamental question asked in the Guantánamo litigation: Are detainees in a US military prison overseas entitled to any legal rights?
But there is an additional twist. After the Supreme Court's 2004 decision, the Bush administration stopped sending detainees to Guantánamo and instead routed them to Bagram, where they were held and interrogated without judicial scrutiny. Until now.

And the Obama Administration has, so far, sided with Bush.

But the new administration faced a February 20 deadline to tell U.S. District Court Judge John Bates whether it would "refine" the Bush administration's position on four men being held at Bagram who have filed suit against their detention.

In a brief filing with the court on Friday, the Justice Department said it would stick to the previous government's position, which argued the four men -- who have been detained at Bagram for over six years -- had no right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court.
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As I wrote over the weekend, progressives who really hoped the Obama administration would roll back the Bush years' secrecy over illegal renditions and torture were waiting with intense interest to see what would happen in a key court case today. Five men were suing Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured.
One of those men is Binyam Mohamed, who was illegally kidnapped and had his penis sliced to bits because he read a spoof online about how to make an H-bomb and who is now still held at Gitmo, where he is on hunger-strike, even though he is no longer accused of any crime. He made headlines at the end of last week because two British judges accused the Bush and Obama administrations of threatening the British government to keep evidence of torture supressed. Two other plaintiffs are in jail in Egypt and Morocco, both countries known to practise torture, after being sent there by the US and the other two are free after being held for years.MORE

Think Progress has found a London Daily Telegraph article that will make your blood run cold. Remember last week the British High Court ruled that documents describing the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident and prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, could not be released to the public because the Bush Administration had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with England ?
Story not true.

UK government suppressed evidence on Binyam Mohamed torture because MI6 helped his interrogators

So when the Britsh Foreign Secretary asked the court to withold information it was to hide this:

A British official, who is regularly briefed on intelligence operations, said: "The concern was that the document revealed that intelligence from the British agencies was used by the Americans and that there were British questions asked while Binyam Mohamed was being tortured.
"Miliband is being pushed hard by the intelligence agencies to protect the identity of those involved."
The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said.

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On Monday, the Obama administration may answer some lingering questions about the parameters of our torture policies now that Bush is history. Oral argument is scheduled to address whether Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan can face trial on civil liability for torture based on its role in extraordinary rendition flights (pdf file). Five men claiming that they were tortured by the US alleged that Jeppesen transported the rendered prisoners to countries known for torture or to CIA black site prisons. A federal district court dismissed the lawsuit when Bush invoked the state secrets privilege. The issue is now on appeal before the 9th Circuit. This is not an either/or issue: The courts have authority to protect our national security, promote governmental transparency and redress harms to torture victims.
The complaint alleges that the US rendered Ethiopian citizen Binyam Mohamed first to a Moroccan prison and then to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. He was tortured at both prisons. Mohamed is now at Guantánamo. Additional plaintiffs include Italian citizen Abou Elkassim Britel, who was rendered from Pakistan to Moroccan agents who tortured him and Egyptian citizen Ahmed Agiza was rendered from Sweden to Egypt, where he was tortured.
Please listen to families telling what happened to these men:

This case raises a few questions:
(1) Do torture victims have a right to a trial to determine the civil liability of a company that knew it was aiding or abetting torture?
A former Jeppesen employee quit after learning first hand that he worked in the outsourcing torture business. During an internal corporate meeting, Bob Overby, a managing director, stated:

"We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights—you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way."

The Jeppsen employee was informed that two of its trip planners worked on the rendition flights, or, as another employee stated, "We do the spook flights."MORE

As I wrote after interviewing Wizner two weeks ago: "This is the first real test of the authenticity of Obama's commitment to reverse the abuses of executive power over the last eight years." Today, the Obama administration failed that test -- resoundingly and disgracefully:

Obama Administration Maintains Bush Position on 'Extraordinary Rendition' Lawsuit
The Obama Administration today announced that it would keep the same position as the Bush Administration in the lawsuit Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc.
A source inside of the Ninth U.S. District Court tells ABC News that a representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn't changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.
This is not going to please civil libertarians and human rights activists who had hoped the Obama administration would allow the lawsuit to proceed.

....


Finally, Wizner noted one last fact that is rather remarkable. The entire claim of "state secrets" in this case is based on two sworn Declarations from CIA Director Michael Hayden -- one public and one filed secretly with the court. In them, Hayden argues that courts cannot adjudicate this case because to do so would be to disclose and thus degrade key CIA programs of rendition and interrogation -- the very policies which Obama, in his first week in office, ordered shall no longer exist. How, then, could continuation of this case possibly jeopardize national security when the rendition and interrogation practices which gave rise to these lawsuits are the very ones that the U.S. Government, under the new administration, claims to have banned?
What this is clearly about is shielding the U.S. Government and Bush officials from any accountability. Worse, by keeping Bush's secrecy architecture in place, it ensures that any future President -- Obama or any other -- can continue to operate behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, with no transparency or accountability even for blatantly criminal acts.MORE

liz_marcs

PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.

No. 13: Require taxpayers to report more detail on capital gains taxes

No. 125: Direct military leaders to end war in Iraq

No. 240: Tougher rules against revolving door for lobbyists and former officials

No. 241: Require new hires to sign a form affirming their hiring was not due to political affiliation or contributions.


No. 427: Ban lobbyist gifts to executive employees

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) – Hours after taking office on Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama ordered military prosecutors in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals to ask for a 120-day halt in all pending cases.

Military judges were expected to rule on the request on Wednesday at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an official involved in the trials said.

The request would halt proceedings in 21 pending cases, including the death penalty case against five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the September 11 hijacked plane attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Prosecutors said in their written request that the halt was "in the interests of justice."

Obama has pledged to shut down the Guantanamo prison camp that was widely seen as a stain on the United States' human rights record and a symbol of detainee abuse and detention without charge under the administration of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush.MORE

Glenn Greenwald:

It seems fairly easy -- even for those overtly hostile to the basic rules of logic and law -- to see what conclusions are compelled by these clear premises:

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.
The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved. . . .
The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The administration of US President George W. Bush authorized the CIA to waterboard Al-Qaeda suspects according to two secret memos issued in 2003 and 2004, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Article 2
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture. . . .
Article 4
1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
Article 7
1. The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
Article 15
Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.

The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

"No one is above the law."

When Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, the United States concluded one of the most traumatic chapters in its history. During the Watergate scandal, Americans had been shocked by the crimes of the Nixon presidency. Investigations by the press and Congress had exposed previously unimaginable levels of corruption and conspiracy in the executive branch. The public's faith in government had been shaken; indeed, the entire "system" had been tested. Now, with Nixon's resignation, two years of agonizing revelations finally seemed to be over. The system had worked.

Yet only four months later, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh disclosed that the government's crimes went beyond Watergate. After months of persistent digging, Hersh had unearthed a new case of the imperial presidency's abuse of secrecy and power: a "massive" domestic spying program by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to Hersh, the CIA had violated its charter and broken the law by launching a spying program of Orwellian dimensions against American dissidents during the Vietnam War. The Times called it "son of Watergate."

These revelations produced a dramatic response from the newly energized post-Watergate Congress and press. Both houses of Congress mounted extensive, year-long investigations of the intelligence community. These highly publicized inquiries, headed by experienced investigators Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike, produced shocking accusations of murder plots and poison caches, of FBI corruption and CIA incompetence. In addition to the congressional inquiries, the press, seemingly at the height of its power after Watergate, launched investigations of its own. The New York Times continued to crusade against CIA abuses; the Washington Post exposed abuses and illegalities committed by the FBI; and CBS's Daniel Schorr shocked the nation by revealing that there might be "literal" skeletons in the CIA closet as a result of its assassination plots.

In this charged atmosphere, editorial writers, columnists, political scientists, historians, and even former officials of the CIA weighed in with various suggestions for reforming an agency that many agreed had become a ''monster.'' Several policymakers, including presidential candidates Fred Harris and Morris Udall, called for massive restructuring or abolition of the CIA. Media and political pundits suggested banning CIA covert operations; transferring most CIA functions to the Pentagon or the State Department; or, at the very least, devising a new, strict charter for all members of the intelligence community.

Few barriers seemed to stand in the way of such reforms. The liberal, post-Watergate Congress faced an appointed president who did not appear to have the strength to resist this "tidal shift in attitude," as Senator Church called it. Change seemed so likely in early 1975 that a writer for The Nation declared "the heyday of the National Security State', to be over, at least temporarily.

But a year and a half later, when the Pike and Church committees finally finished their work, the passion for reform had cooled. The House overwhelmingly rejected the work of the Pike committee and voted to suppress its final report. It even refused to set up a standing intelligence committee. The Senate dealt more favorably with the Church committee, but it too came close to rejecting all of the committee's recommendations. Only last-minute parliamentary maneuvering enabled Church to salvage one reform, the creation of a new standing committee on intelligence. The proposed charter for the intelligence community, though its various components continued to be hotly debated for several years, never came to pass.

The investigations failed to promote the careers of those who had inspired and led them. Daniel Schorr, the CBS reporter who had advanced the CIA story at several important points and eventually had become part of the story himself, was investigated by Congress, threatened with jail, and fired by CBS for his role in leaking the suppressed Pike report. Seymour Hersh's exposes were dismissed by his peers as "overwritten, over-played, under-researched and underproven." Otis Pike, despite the many accomplishments of his committee, found his name linked with congressional sensationalism, leaks, and poor administration. Frank Church's role in the investigation failed to boost his presidential campaign, forced him to delay his entry into the race, and, he thought, might have cost him the vice presidency.

This was immediately post-Watergate, probably the most likely time in history for the government and the press to be able to change the way things were done. The new congress, the bumbling appointed president, the country's weariness with Vietnam and the shocking revelations of Nixonian overreach all argued in favor of the congress being able to step up and make serious changes. And I actually thought they did. But I misremembered. The sturm and drang of the period and my own youthful political leanings led me to believe that the Pike and Church Committees resulted in real reforms. And because it so damaged the careers of so many of those involved who tried, the political lesson is pretty stark.MORE

Pastor Lowery's most recent claims to fame are his publicly chastising George W. Bush on Iraq during his eulogy at Coretta Scott King's funeral, and his publicly chastising various preachers for being fixated on attacking gays when they should be attacking poverty:
The Reverend stated that we "are too easily divided and victimized by ‘weapons of mass distraction.’" Here he told the story of an African-American, Washington, DC-based pastor (who he kept nameless within his speech but who we all know to be the Reverend Willie Wilson of the 8,000-member Union Temple Baptist Church) who led his congregation down a path of division and mis-guidance, preaching and pushing for an amendment against same-sex marriage. The Reverend asked, Why care about something like same-sex marriage when millions of your own children are dying in starvation and poverty within the slums? The Reverend went on to speak on respect for all people and how that played in to Civil and Human Rights as a whole. He said that if you are one who says, "I believe in human rights for all people, except for..." then you really don’t believe in human rights or equality. To believe in equality and human rights is to believe in it for all people. If you don’t, then you are, according to the Reverend, creating an oxymoron and certainly not standing up for equality. He said no matter what race, color, religion, creed, sex, gender OR sexual orientation... we are all deserving of human rights, civil rights and equality. The Reverend said he "sometimes wonders about people who are so homophobic." Quoting Hamlet, he said, "Me thinks you doth protest too much." The audience responded with laughter and applause. He continued, "If a person is a secure in their sexuality, they have no time to waste on sneaking around to see what you are doing."MORE

Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery at Coretta Scott King's funeral

First, let's look at what Google's up to. The Journal doesn't bother describing it until the very end of the article, and the description is sorely lacking; all the authors say is that the deal would "place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers." Fortunately, Google's Public Policy Blog has been used for damage control, as company counsel Richard Whitt describes the system in more detail. The plans are to have Google become its own edge-caching service provider, and do what commercial companies like Akamai are already engaged in: hosting copies of content at servers with high-speed connections to major regional networks. Under this system, users who are looking to obtain a large download, such as a video, get redirected to a copy of the file on a server that is local to them, providing a low-latency connection that avoids any network congestion elsewhere on the Internet.

Google's twist on the edge-caching setup is that it doesn't want to bother with the hassle of setting up a server facility and arranging a fat pipe to connect it with the local network. Instead, they're negotiating with ISPs to simply colocate their servers in the existing network facilities, neatly clearing both of these hurdles. Google emphasizes that these deals won't be exclusive—any content provider could get the same sort of deal if it's willing to pay the ISPs' price—and its commitment to net neutrality stands.

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As long as US telecom is duopoly dominated, a neutral Internet is endangered if not impossible; regulation of this kind of concentrated power is necessary but is unlikely to be sufficient. The solution, IMHO, is to dilute the power of the duopoly so that consumers can buy whatever kind of Internet access they want. Countries like the UK with a competitive ISP market do not seem to have net neutrality problems nor require net neutrality regulation and have better Internet access than we do at lower prices.

... part of the problem with net neutrality regulation; it's almost impossible to write workable definitions. Fervent supporters of the concept of net neutrality disagree on what is or isn't a violation of such neutrality. There is a huge danger that any regulation would result in further advantage to the incumbents who are accustomed to using regulation to their advantage. Would you want to wait for the FCC to certify your new service neutral before you could introduce it?

On the other hand, it's easy to recognize the virtues of a neutral Internet. With a few exceptions, we've had that so far. The backbone itself delivers packets to anywhere from anywhere without trying to figure out who sent them or what they might contain. It is wide open to innovation. It allows innovative business models whether they're disruptive or not – and whether they will ultimately succeed or not. Friend Om Malik warns "Many startups might skip over this issue, which I constantly bring up, but they need to wake up and realize that in the end they are all going to be impacted if network neutrality is backstabbed to death." He's right.