fox news projects itself on the obama administration

Back from semi-retirement because of this headline from Faux I mean Fox News: Some Fear Bush Administration Could Become Target in 9/11 Trial.

The "some" that fear this includes Karl Rove. Why does Rove fear it? For two reasons. First, he knows the de facto Bush Administration was incompetent and morally corrupt in its response to 9/11 and in its policy of torturing people. (Eric Holder and company at DOJ must feel they have a very good case against these bastards that won't rely on their own testimony, since that would be badly tainted by the fact that they were tortured.)

And second, if 9/11 had happened on Al Gore's watch and George W. Bush had been elected president in 2008, Rove would have made DAMN sure that a trial of these Al Qaeda criminals would have had Gore and the Democrats as the main target. Rove and Fox News are projecting THEIR tactics upon the Obama Administration.

torture, photos, commissions...

On balance I am disappointed that President Obama decided against releasing the torture photos. Short-term I suspect they WOULD inflame some in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, potentially endangering American troops and other interests.

Of course, it really wouldn't be the PHOTOS that do that, but just further confirmation of the fact that the United States under the de facto Bush Administration was torturing people. In the long run I think these photos will get out anyway. Better to release them all at once and get it over with.

I'm less critical on the decision to keep military commissions. Trying terrorism suspects will be difficult. Personally I think the courts can probably handle it. But military commissions with greater legal protections for the accused may be okay. We'll have to see how this goes. But on balance, I think this is a wrong decision - less wrong than the photos, but wrong anyway.

Oh and I'm sorry senior CIA people but your agency's credibility on torture and the reasons for it are totally shot. The TIMING of the most intense torture of people like Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed - in other words, in late 2002/early 2003, precisely at the time Cheney and his crowd wanted "proof" of the links between Al Qaida and Saddam's Iraq - is just too convenient. Hey, these guys had been coming out with information under normal interrogation techniques, but would NOT admit to Al Qaida/Iraq links (for the excellent reason that there WERE NONE). If one thing has been proven about torture, it is that it is very good at getting the victims to say what the interrogators WANT them to say. So, you waterboard those thugs often enough and ask them over and over, "Al Qaida and Saddam were working together, right? Right?", eventually they will wise up and say "Yes" just to make the torture stop.

republicans are guaranteed to be unhappy

President Obama said he would replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter with somebody who "respects the Constitution and brings "empathy" and "understanding" to the bench."

Respecting the Constitution? Empathy? Understanding? These are not Republican judicial values! They want ideologues like Antonin Scalia, who can twist the Constitution and the law to support Republican ideological goals. Understanding the Constitution? That sort of crazy talk could have allowed Al Gore to have been allowed to become President.

regrets, he's had a few

At least that's what friends say about federal judge and de facto Bush Administration torture defender Jay Bybee.

But the defense is a bit feeble. One guy said, "On the primary memo, that legitimated and defined torture, he just felt it got away from him. What I understand that to mean is, any lawyer, when he or she is writing about something very complicated, very layered, sometimes you can get it all out there and if you're not careful, you end up in a place you never intended to go. I think for someone like Jay, who's a formalist and a textualist, that's a particular danger."

So the words just piled up and before you know it, you're legalizing TORTURE? Pardon my skepticism.

Look, I know it must be tough to be working in a government agency and to know you have the ruler of the country - oh and not just Dick Cheney but also the President - leaning on you to come to a certain conclusion in your work. We saw this with how Cheney and his allies in the Administration leaned on CIA analysts to come up with "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and "proof" that Iraq had an active WMD program. It must have been hard for Bybee and others to resist when Cheney's bigfoot David Addington was pressuring them for some after-the-fact legal findings that the extreme measures being employed against some detainees were legal.

And Jay Bybee may really regret it now. But that's not an excuse. "Just following orders" went out of vogue with the Nuremberg Trials. If this process really went to places where Bybee felt uncomfortable, legally or morally, he should have done the honorable thing and refused to sign the memos.

Or he should have quit.

a good decision but NOT a vindication

Attorney General Eric Holder has asked the judge to dismiss the federal corruption case against former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, because the prosecution team has repeatedly screwed up, for example not turning over evidence to the defense.

Now that is NOT a vindication for Ted Stevens. There is still the question of Stevens accepting gifts worth over a quarter of a million dollars from "friends," many of whom had business before Congress.

But it is a very good decision by Holder. Prosecutors have a responsibility to make sure they have the case lined up correctly and to be above-board. Despite the fact that Stevens is almost certainly guilty of accepting bribes, Holder made the right call, and I imagine the judge will dismiss the case.

Oh and by the way - can you imagine any of former de facto President Bush's Attorneys General dismissing a case against a member of the Democratic Party because of inappropriate behavior by the prosecutors? Of course not. The Bush Justice Department was more likely to FIRE prosecutors for refusing to charge Democrats when evidence was not there, rather than to fire them for tampering with evidence or just not following correct procedures.

The case was screwed up; the Public Integrity Section at Justice clearly needs reform. But a big nod to Holder for making a difficult but appropriate call. Even if it lets an arrogant jerk like Ted Stevens walk.

two more reminders that george w. bush is no longer president

I occasionally have to remind myself that the de facto Bush Administration is over. Two items help bring that fact home.

First, President Obama has nominated Craig Fugate to be the head of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency of "heck of a job Brownie" Katrina screw-up fame. And Fugate is actually qualified. He has headed Florida's Division of Emergency Management since 2001, and has done a good job in running the agency and responding to hurricanes. Fugate was first appointed by Jeb Bush, the competent Bush brother. And he is a choice that I can't imagine George W. having made. Hope he's up to date on his taxes.

And second, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers will testify about the Great US Attorney Massacre and their roles. Admittedly, it will be before the House Judiciary Committe, with no cameras or media present. But they WILL be subject to perjury if (?) they lie, and transcripts will be made and eventually published.

Not entirely perfect, but the perjury element is important.

injustice, continued

Just because de facto President George W. Bush is gone back to Texas doesn't mean that Republican attacks on justice are over. This time, it's literal - they don't want to approve Eric Holder as Attorney-General unless Obama's Department of Justice promises not to prosecute anybody over national security abuses.

Funny. I thought the Bush and Republican Party line was that there WERE no crimes committed, and nobody was tortured, and no civil liberties were infringed, and no laws broken. So what are they worried about? The fact that they want such a guarantee is the very best reason for refusing to give one.

It's an unAmerican thing to do, to ask for assurances that essentially put these men above the law. UnAmerican, and Republican.

I don't know whether or not there is a good case, and a good reason, to prosecute. But as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said, "Anyone familiar with the criminal justice system -- especially those with experience as prosecutors or judges -- should know that a prosecutor should make no determination about who to prosecute before he or she has all the facts, and particularly not in response to legislative pressure."

bush official on torture

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani." Who said that? Susan J. Crawford, life-long Republican and experienced judge, who is the convening authority of military commissions.

Crawford didn't lay it solely on the interrogators, either, saying the techniques were authorized.

She detailed the physical and mental abuse heaped on Qahtani (who, no doubt, would have been happy to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, as he had planned).

We already know torture is ineffective, that there are better techniques to get information, and that even the Israelis agree torture doesn't work.

But Crawford also made this point about the torture she has found in her investigation: "I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it."

Well said. Even if torture WERE effective, we as a country should be above using it.

jim webb on prisons

I missed this but Virginia Senator Jim Webb (D) wants to reform American prisons. He notes a lot of problems - incarceration rates that put us in the same range as China, young blacks being in prison disproportionately, too many people in prison for little things like parole violation or holding drugs while violent offenders are out on the street.

Webb is no bleeding-heart liberal. He's identified a lot of problems. The prison-industrial complex will no doubt oppose him - hey, if you are running a for-profit prison, every guy put in prison for being found with pot while on parole is a revenue source. The so-called law & order types and people who are still convinced (despite ALL evidence to the contrary) that locking people up and seizing property without due process is the only way to keep us all safe from the scourge of illegal drugs will also no doubt oppose any reform efforts with scare tactics and innuendo that Webb is soft on criminals. But I wish Webb luck - this is a battle worth fighting.

more on rod

Joe Queenan notes that the quest for favors in return for selecting somebody to the Senate wasn't Rod Blagojevich's worst crime - shaking down companies and banks is worse.

And Frank Rich reminds that Governor Rod is far from the biggest fish Patrick Fitzgerald has bagged. But unlike Scooter Libby, Blagojevich is unlikely to get anybody to commute his sentence, should it come to that...

torture investigations

Former Justice Department high-level lawyer Jack Goldsmith suggests we not have any more torture investigations beyond the ones underway.

One reason Goldsmith gives for recommending such forbearance is it would make lawyers too cautious in giving advice: "Second-guessing lawyers' wartime decisions under threat of criminal and ethical sanctions may sound like a good idea to those who believe those lawyers went too far in the fearful days after Sept. 11, 2001. But the greater danger now is that lawyers will become excessively cautious in giving advice and will substitute predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment."

Bullshit.

There are few things as clear to any non-Bush lawyer than the fact that torture was illegal under American law, under the military's rules, and under our treaty obligations. The Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo were in fact substituting "predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment." They KNEW that Dick Cheney and probably George W. Bush WANTED them to find legal justification for indulging in the "dark side" stuff Cheney so fervently advocated. They knew because they'd been told so.

Deciding to forgo torture investigations will just as clearly send the signal that lawyers can make even the most tortured (pardon the pun but it's the right word) legal argument to twist their way into a legal finding that they believe will satisfy their bosses. Just like John Yoo and David Addington did.

pardon the pardon

Eric Holder had a good reputation as Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton. He looks like a solid choice (if he is in fact Obama's pick) to head up the Department of Justice.

And Republicans - and even the Washington Post editorial board - seem to want to make a big deal out of Holder's role in Bill Clinton's infamous pardon of Marc Rich. Senator Chuck Grassley said in a statement that Holder's selection is "going to be much more controversial than a new administration ought to try to put forth." The Post editors write that "Mr. Holder must be questioned again about his failure to block that unconscionable pardon."

Look, Holder himself has admitted that failing to oppose it was a mistake. But the fault wasn't his. It was Bill Clinton's. The Rich pardon was unforgivable. It reeked.

But ultimately, it was legal. The President has that power granted in the Constitution. And Rich went straight to the White House to seek it.

I'd rather see Grassley and the Post editors look into actions of our recent attorney generals, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, to look into their roles in whitewashing torture and their roles in converting the Department of Justice into an arm of the Republican National Committee by firing prosecutors who don't show sufficient zeal in prosecuting Democrats like Don Sigelman for the crime of threatening Republican politicians with electoral defeat.

Sheesh.

not alone

It is no surprise that the Department of Justice's investigation found that Monica Goodling made hiring decisions based on naked partisanship. Conservative Republican? Hired. Practically anybody else? Sorry, we only want "good Americans" at Bush's Justice Department.

But surely nobody believes that Goodling acted alone on this impulse? Yet somehow this article neglects to mention whether DOJ's investigation named anybody else. I suspect it did not - they're throwing Goodling overboard to save their own bacon.

a reminder of why the presidential election is so important

You know how conservatives always decry "activist" judges? Well they should be up in arms over the Supreme Court's decision on the Second Amendment. After all, it swept away over a century of precedent and established jurisprudence when Antonin Scalia decided that the Second Amendment's reference to the militia was merely decorative and didn't have any effect on the rest of the amendment.

Overturning the duly passed laws of local government - in this case, the District of Columbia - and imposing their own ideological view. THAT is the very definition of an activist court. And that's what we face - only it isn't an activist court like that of Earl Warren, expanding civil rights for Americans who had been discriminated against.

It is a right-wing authoritarian activist court, expanding the right of the Federal Government (as long as it is a REPUBLICAN Federal Government like the de facto Bush Administration) to do what it wishes, the Constitution be damned.

So keep that in mind when you vote. Several of the liberal and moderate members of the Court are older - much older - than John McCain. If Roberts and Alito and Scalia are your kind of judges, vote McCain. If you prefer something approaching sanity on the Court, vote Obama.

(no) voting rights

I see the Supreme Court voted 6-3 against a challenge to the Indiana law requiring voters to show photo ID before voting.

This law was allegedly designed to battle voter fraud.  Of which there is documented proof of perhaps dozens of individuals voting where/when they should not.  Dozens NATION-WIDE, that is.  It is a "problem" that comes in below the statistical margin of error on the margin of error in counting the votes.

No, this law is designed to do one thing:  deter the poor, the elderly, and minorities from voting.  The sort of people who may not have drivers licenses.  

The sort of people who have the annoying habit of voting Democratic.

So the GOP-dominated Supreme Court has validated the GOP program - which is not limited to Indiana - of making it hard for these people to vote.

Maybe they would like to bring back literacy tests and poll taxes.

gotta make up for lost time

So glad to hear that various US states are getting ready to clear up their execution backlog, since the Supreme Court decided that lethal injections were ok with them.

After all, we are falling behind in the global Who Can Execute the Most of Its Own Citizens competition. We can't let China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia stay ahead of us, can we?

a political prisoner speaks out

News today about a former politician who was prosecuted on trumped-up charges basically because the ruling party knew he was popular, and they didn't want to have to compete with him. So the ruling party used its personal connections with various prosecutors, handpicked a judge with a personal grudge against the dissident politician, had tried him for a "crime" that really wasn't a crime at all, and then the judge threw him into the slammer without even being allowed to remain free while appealing the conviction.

Now this political prisoner has been released and he is speaking out about his ordeal.

Some story from a banana republic in Latin America or a big-man ruled country in Africa?

Not quite. This is Alabama, folks. Alabama, USA. The ruling party is the Republican Party. And the political prisoner is former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, whose REAL crime* was being a popular Democrat who threatened to defeat current Alabama Governor Bob Riley in a fair election in 2006.

Released two weeks ago by a judge who recognized that he had been treated unfairly by being imprisoned immediately upon his conviction, Siegelman is now speaking out. And he's accusing Karl Rove and the Republican Party national leadership of being behind his incarceration.

It's a sordid tale. And before you go dismissing it as a conspiracy theory or sour grapes on Siegelman's part, make yourself familiar with the case - best bet is Scott Horton's reporting, his blog at Harper's has all the details.

And remember again the Great US Attorney Massacre was in part about Bush's Justice Department getting rid of federal prosecutors who were unwilling to indict Democratic candidates right before elections.** Siegelman's treatment is not an aberration in George Bush's Republican America.

It's a tactic.


*The "crime" was giving an unpaid part-time job to somebody who made a legal campaign contribution. The de facto Bush Administration has given paid jobs to hundreds of people who made legal campaign contributions, none of whom have been prosecuted. That's the best the Alabama/Rove vigilante gang could come up with.

**The other reason - failure to try to suppress the vote among pro-Democratic populations by seeking "voter fraud" cases to prosecute.

was it a political prosecution?

Just found this - a Miami Herald article from over the weekend reports that a citizen told the FBI in November that then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer hooked up with a high-price call girl in Miami.

The citizen? Roger Stone, GOP political operative.

From the Herald article: Stone, known for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County, is a longtime Spitzer nemesis whose political experience ranges from the Nixon White House to Al Sharpton's presidential campaign. His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted."

Hardly a disinterested tipster. How does this track with the timeline of the Spitzer investigation? The strength of the conspiracy claim grows stronger...

Maybe it's time for Larry Flynt to ask the public to turn in REPUBLICAN types who have cavorted with prostitutes - beyond the known ones like Senator David Vitter and former USAID Administrator Randall Tobias, I mean. But funny, THEY won't be prosecuted by the de facto Bush Administration's Department of Republican Justice.

today's REAL scandal

No it isn't the revelation that New York Governor Elliot Spitzer enjoyed the company of prostitutes. That's between him and his wife, assuming he didn't use state funds.

The real scandal is an ongoing one - the refusal of the de facto Bush Administration's so-called Department of Justice to acknowledge that Congress has a right to compel testimony.

So now the House Judiciary Committee is suing to force Josh Bolten (White House chief of staff) and Harriet Miers, Bush's former lawyer, to come and talk to them about the Great US Attorney Massacre.

Love the advanced legal reasoning now being advanced by Alberto Gonzales' spiritual heir, Michael Mukasey. Mukasey says that Bolten, Miers and others "cannot be prosecuted because they were following legal advice from the Justice Department."

What? Where is THAT written? Legal advice to do something that turns out to be against the law is no shield from the law - even if it is from lawyers (actually, almost certainly from political appointees not career lawyers) at the Department of Justice.

If the Department of Justice advised the White House that sending Karl Rove on a secret mission to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and ship her to Guantanamo, would that immunize Rove from testifying about the plot?

This is absurd. They are playing out the string, hoping to delay Congress until the Bush Administration finally leaves town. I hope Congress doesn't just drop it then. There were crimes committed, by people in the White House and at Justice. Remember, this is about firing competent attorneys because they failed to show adequate loyalty to the Fuehrer, sorry I mean Decider. And THAT lack of loyalty was based on their refusal to bring questionable legal cases against DEMOCRATIC candidates right before elections.

In other words, they were fired for putting the rule of law ahead of the cult of personality that the Bush Republican Party has exalted these past 7-plus years (and longer if you consider their unthinking love for St Ronald of Reagan). And for not recognizing Bush/Cheney's theory of the Unitary Executive which roughly translated means "personal rule of the President and all loyalty owed to him, not the Consitution or law or country." You know, like Louis XIV enjoyed in France or Henry VIII in England, hundreds of years ago.

contempt

The House found Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers to be in contempt for refusing "to cooperate with an investigation into the mass firings of U.S. attorneys and allegations that administration officials sought to politicize the Justice Department."

The Democrats had no choice - the de facto Bush Administration continues to take the most expansive interpretation of "executive privilege" ever. They offered to let Bolten and Miers testify as long as they didn't swear an oath, and no transcript was taken.

How generous. Given the well-documented predilection of this Administration to lie at any conceivable occasion, that was an offer nobody should accept.

"Contempt" has a legal connotation in this instance. But it is an accurate word, except the Bushies aren't just in contempt of the House.

They are contemptuous of America and the world, of anybody who hasn't drunk their Kool-Aid and doesn't see things exactly as they do.