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by JackRiddler » Sun Feb 20, 2011 5:31 pm
by JackRiddler » Wed Mar 02, 2011 12:17 pm
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49998.html
The Justice Department under President Barack Obama has quietly dropped its legal representation of more than a dozen Bush-era Pentagon and administration officials - including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and aide Paul Wolfowitz - in a lawsuit by Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla, who spent years behind bars without charges in conditions his lawyers compare to torture.
Charles Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that the government has agreed to retain private lawyers for the officials, at a cost of up to $200 per hour. Miller said “conflicts concerns” prompted the decision. He did not elaborate.
One private attorney involved in the case, who asked not to be named, said the Obama administration apparently concluded “its duty to represent the defendants zealously, which includes the duty to argue any and all defenses, can’t be discharged for reasons of policy and other government interests.”
The Justice Department continues to represent only a single official, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in the suit.
Last week a federal judge in Charleston, S.C. dismissed Padilla’s suit against Gates, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and several military officers who oversaw Padilla’s confinement at the nearby Navy brig. Judge Richard Gergel said allowing the case to proceed could result in “a massive discovery assault on the intelligence agencies of the United States Government….and lengthy and probing depositions of high-ranking government officials with national security clearances and personal knowledge of some of the Nation’s most sensitive information.”
However, a federal judge in San Francisco, weighing a separate but parallel suit against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo ruled that case could go forward. Yoo authored memos that gave legal justifications for aggressive interrogations of terrorism detainees. (The government previously stepped back from representing Yoo.)
“The basic facts alleged in the complaint clearly violate the rights afforded to citizens held in the prison context,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote. “The fact that a unique type or designation of a detainee has come into being does not obliterate the clearly established minimum protections for those held in detention…. The complaint alleges conduct that would be unconstitutional if directed at any detainee.”
As a result of the conflict between the two rulings, lawyers involved in the Padilla lawsuits believe they are almost certainly destined for the Supreme Court
Legal ethics experts said the Justice Department’s withdrawal could stem from qualms about a full-throated defense of Padilla’s treatment while in military custody. His lawyers claim that Padilla’s captors in the brig subjected him to abuse including sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, imminent death threats, forced drugging and interference with his practice of Islam.
“Some of the [defendants] may have wanted to make more extreme arguments about the legality of their conduct than the Justice Department was willing to accept,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of law at New York University.
Another potential complication: Attorney General Eric Holder signed three Supreme Court amicus briefs objecting to the Bush administration’s treatment of Padilla.
Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of Padilla’s lawyers, welcomed the Justice Department’s decision.
“If that’s true, the administration deserves credit,” said Wizner, who counted 14 lawyers for the defense at a recent court session in South Carolina. “The notion that Donald Rumsfeld is above the law and Jose Padilla is beneath it is unworthy of the United States and dangerous to any democracy.”
Private lawyers for several of the defendants either declined to comment on the development or did not return messages seeking comment. Well-known GOP lawyers Lee Casey and David Rivkin are now representing Rumsfeld, while Wolfowitz retained former terrorism prosecutor Paul Butler.
The Brooklyn-born Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in 2002 for allegedly plotting an attack involving a radioactive explosive, or “dirty bomb.” On orders from President George W. Bush, Padilla was quickly moved into military custody and spent more three years in the brig without charges.
In 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Bush’s right to detain Padilla, but the Bush administration averted a Supreme Court battle by obtaining a terrorism-support indictment of Padilla in federal court in Florida. He was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
by JackRiddler » Tue Apr 05, 2011 2:43 am
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/kpete/17213
New BUSHCO Docs Reveal How Yoo Eliminated 4th Amendment So Cheney Could Wiretap Illegally
Posted by kpete in General Discussion
Sat Mar 19th 2011, 11:54 AM
Newly Released OLC Opinion Reveals How Yoo Relied on Eliminating Fourth Amendment to Wiretap Illegally
By: emptywheel Saturday March 19, 2011 7:05 am-According To Yoo It's The 4th Amendment That's Quaint
As Josh Gerstein
http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerst ... ml?showall
and Jack Goldsmith
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/03/doj- ... ce-opinion
note, DOJ just released two of the opinions underlying the warrantless wiretap programs. They both focus on the May 6, 2004 opinion.
https://webspace.utexas.edu/rmc2289/OLC%2054.FINAL.PDF
Goldsmith wrote in the wake of the hospital confrontation; I’ll have far more to say about that opinion later today and/or tomorrow.
But I wanted to look at what the highly redacted opinion John Yoo wrote on November 2, 2001 tells us.
The opinion is so completely redacted we only get snippets. Those snippets are, in part:FISA only provides safe harbor for electronic surveillance, and cannot restrict the President’s ability to engage in warrantless searches that protect the national security.
..............
Thus, unless Congress made a clear statement that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area–which it has not–then the statute must be construed to avoid such a reading.
..................
intelligence gathering in direct support of military operations does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures.
...................
A warrantless search can be constitutional “when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable.”
................
Cheney’s illegal wiretapping program was totally legal. What you didn’t know, though, is that the Fourth Amendment is just a quaint artifact of time before 9/11.
by JackRiddler » Sun Aug 28, 2011 6:25 pm
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html
Thursday, Aug 18, 2011 07:19 ET
Obama v. Bush on power over Congress
By Glenn Greenwald
AP/Lawrence Jackson/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
George W. Bush and Barack Obama
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
Scott Lemieux hauls out the presidency-is-weak excuse to explain away some of Obama's failures; I've addressed that theory many times at length before and won't repeat those points here, but this bit of historical revisionism, made in service of that excuse-making, merits a response:
I've asked this before, but since I've never received a decent answer let me ask again: for people who believe in the Green Lantern theory of domestic presidential power, how do you explain the near-total lack of major legislation passed during George W. Bush's second term, including a failure to even get a congressional vote on his signature initiative to privatize Social Security? He didn’t give enough speeches? He wasn’t ruthless enough? Help me out here.
Lemieux's strangely selective focus on Bush's second rather than first term is worth a brief comment. After all, the current President in question is in his first term, which would seem to make that period (when Bush dictated to a submissive Congress at will, including when Democrats controlled the Senate) the better point of comparison; moreover, by his second term, Bush was plagued by a deeply unpopular war, fatigue over his voice after so many years, and collapsed approval ratings, which explains his weakness relative to his first term. None of that has been true of Obama over the last two years. And Bush never enjoyed Congressional majorities as large as Obama had for his first two years.
But more to the point, to claim that there was a "near-total lack of major legislation passed during George W. Bush's second term" means Lemieux has either forgotten about numerous events during that period or has a very narrow definition of the word "major." There was, for instance, this:
That bill -- passed with substantial Democratic support -- basically legalized Bush's previously illegal warrantless domestic spying program and bestowed retroactive immunity on the entire telecom industry, which seems pretty "major" to me. So does this:
That bill, a huge boon to the credit card industry, strangled the ability of ordinary Americans to work their way out of debt, which also strikes me as quite "major." Then there's this:
That's referring to the Military Commissions Act, enacted upon the demands of the Bush administration with substantial Democratic support; I trust I don't need to explain how "major" that was. There was also this:
Democrats babbled about the evils of the Patriot Act for years and then meekly submitted to Bush's demands that its key and most controversial provisions be renewed; that also seems "major." Just as significant was the legislation Bush prevented the Congress from passing, even when both houses were controlled by Democrats, such as this:
Given that the Democrats in the 2006 midterm election convinced the American people to hand them control of the Senate and House by promising to end the deeply unpopular war in Iraq, Bush's repeated success in blocking any such efforts -- accomplished by things such as steadfast, serious veto threats -- strikes me as a very "major" victory.
Granted, Bush's success on Iraq falls into the foreign rather than domestic realm, and some of the other examples are hybrids (Patriot Act and domestic spying), but they illustrate the real power Presidents can exert over Congress. Moreover, this presidency-is-weak excuse is often invoked to justify Obama's failures in all contexts beyond purely domestic policy (e.g., closing Guantanamo and the war in Libya). And all this is to say nothing of the panoply of domestic legislation -- including Bush tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, and the Medicare D prescription drug entitlement -- that Bush pushed through Congress in his first term, or his virtually unrestrained ability to force Congress to confirm even his most controversial nominees, including when Democrats were in control of Congress.
That doesn't seem too weak or ineffectual to me: quite the opposite. In fact, so dominant was the Bush White House over Congress that Dan Froomkin, in 2007 -- when Democrats controlled both houses -- memorably observed: "Historians looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually existed." In sum, nobody -- and I mean nobody -- was talking about how weak the presidency supposedly is before Barack Obama was inaugurated: neither in the domestic nor foreign policy realm. To the contrary, just a few years ago, the power of the Presidency was typically conceived of as far too robust, not too limited.
It is true, as Lemieux suggests, that Bush suffered some legislative defeats in his second term (three in particular), but even those defeats highlight critical points about Obama. Two of those defeats -- failure of immigration reform and the forced withdrawal of the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination -- happened not because a powerful Congress overrode him, but rather because his own right-wing base rose up and refused to accept those proposals on the ground that they so violently conflicted with their political values: imagine that! The other defeat -- Social Security privatization -- was a real defeat because that's a very difficult goal to achieve in American politics (The Third Rail), but Bush did everything possible to succeed (including frenzily touring the country for months with speeches making his case), which is how one knew that he really wanted that to happen. That's what Presidents do when they're genuinely committed to a goal rather than pretending to be.
In that regard, Lemieux, ironically, claims to be burning down a strawman even as he props up his own: a very common one among those making this weak-presidency excuse. Nobody -- and I mean nobody -- argues that Obama can impose without constraints whatever policy outcomes he wants (what Lemieux and many others deride as the "Green Lantern Theory"). That viewpoint is a non-existent caricature. Of course it's the case that Presidents sometimes fail even when they use all the weapons in their arsenal (as Bush did with Social Security privatization).
The critique of Obama isn't that he tries but fails to achieve certain progressive outcomes and his omnipotence should ensure success. Nobody believes he's omnipotent. The critique is that he doesn't try, doesn't use the weapons at his disposal: the ones he wields when he actually cares about something (such as the ones he uses to ensure ongoing war funding -- or, even more convincing, see the first indented paragraph here). That evidence leads to the rational conclusion that he is not actually committed to (or, worse, outright opposes) many of the outcomes which progressive pundits assume he desires.
That's why Paul Krugman has been pointing out over and over that Obama wasn't helplessly forced into an austerity mindset by an intransigent Congress but actually believes in it, that he wants severe cuts. Identically, the evidence is now overwhelming that the public option was excluded from the health care bill because Obama wanted that outcome and thus secretly negotiated it away with the insurance industry, not because Congress or the 60-vote requirement prevented it. Similarly, while Congress did enact legislation preventing the closing of Guantanamo, Obama never wanted to shut it down in any meaningful way, but simply move it (and its defining abuse: indefinite detention) a few thousand miles North to Illinois.
The criticism isn't that Obama tried but failed to stave off austerity policies, a public-option-free entrenchment of the private health insurance industry, the preservation of indefinite detention or similar "centrist"/right/corporatist policies; it's that his lack of fight against them (or his affirmative fight for them) shows he craves those outcomes (just as nobody forced him to continue the vast bulk of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism approach he (and most Democrats) once so vehemently denounced). And whatever else is true, claiming that George Bush was similarly "weak" in the face of Congress is revisionist in the extreme.
* * * * *
One last point: Lemieux's very literalist criticism of Vast Left's cartoon [below] isn't exactly wrong -- it's a two-line cartoon that relies on caricature -- but its central point is accurate: there is a serious, obvious tension between, on the one hand, saying things like this to explain away Obama's failures, and then turning around and announcing that his re-election must be the overarching, supreme priority that outweighs and subordinates all other political concerns, both short- and long-term.
UPDATE: Elissar008 reminds me in comments that I neglected to include this:
Bailing out Wall Street with $700 billion seems to be yet another "major" legislative accomplishment no matter how one might define that term.
UPDATE II: In comments, dgt004 notes another irony: "Bush's major failure during his second term was the inability to gut social security. However, Obama appears to be on the verge of doing so successfully." If that happens -- and it is a prime purpose of the Super Committee, since those eager to cut Social Security have long said it can happen only with a bipartisan, fast-tracked Commission -- we will undoubtedly hear the same claim: that a helpless Obama was tragically forced into accepting it by Congress. That Obama has said over and over -- in public -- that he desires and is fighting for exactly this outcome will not deter the proffering of that "weakness" excuse. It is strange indeed -- and revealing -- that some Obama supporters think the best way to defend him is by constantly emphasizing his weakness.
UPDATE III: Highly recommended: Yale Professor David Bromwich examines the "impressive continuities" of what he calls the "Bush-Obama presidency." It's a very thorough list: consider how much of it can be fairly blamed on Congress.
Loading...
EDITION: U.S.
August 27, 2011
David Bromwich
Professor of Literature at Yale
Symptoms of the Bush-Obama Presidency
Posted: 8/18/11 11:12 AM ET
Cross-posted from TomDispatch.
The Saved and the Sacked
Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?
The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of “state secrets” to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact -- the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.
The significance of this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in 2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had been presented as “sectarian feuding” began to look like a war of national liberation against an occupying power, the American press exhibited an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington’s embrace of “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it -- along with the Afghan War -- has returned only occasionally in the four years since.
This disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep the wars going but normalize them; make them normal by not talking about them much; by not talking about them imply that, while “victory” is not in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately been given a name. They call it “success.”
Meanwhile, back at home...
The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.
One of the last good times that President Obama enjoyed before the frenzy of debt negotiations began was a chuckle he shared with Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric and now head of the president’s outside panel of economic advisers. At a June 13th meeting of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a questioner said he assumed that President Obama knew about the difficulties caused by the drawn-out process of securing permits for construction jobs. Obama leaned into the microphone and offered a breezy ad-lib: “Shovel ready wasn’t as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected” -- and Immelt got off a hearty laugh. An unguarded moment: the president of “hope and change” signifying his solidarity with the big managers whose worldly irony he had adopted.
A certain mystery surrounds Obama’s perpetuation of Bush’s economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush’s war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.
Bush we knew the meaning of, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all whose hopes once rested with him.
The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: “By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.”
Suppose we test the last two and a half years by the same sensible criterion. Translated into the language of presidential power -- the power of a president whose method was to field a “team of rivals” and “lead from behind” -- the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.
Let us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences, and group them by the answers to two questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his association with? Think of them as the saved and the sacked. Obama’s taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.
The Saved
Advisers whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to stay:
1. Lawrence Summers: Obama’s chief economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks -- holders of the savings of ordinary people -- from the speculative action of the brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glass-Steagall was to protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse. Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the deregulation of complex derivatives -- a dream fully realized under Bush. In the first months of the Obama era, given a free hand by the president, he commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programs for job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.
In 2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers’s power was Timothy Geithner, Obama’s treasury secretary. Most likely, Geithner was picked for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush’s treasury secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as “a very unusually talented young man,” and worked with him closely in 2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed. At that time, he concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama for his part initiated several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign -- often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is unbroken. Any tremors in the president’s closed world caused by Summers’s early departure from the administration have probably been offset by Geithner’s recent reassurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond 2011.
Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13th, he criticized the president’s dilatoriness in mounting a program to create jobs. Thus he urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues to defend.
2. Robert Gates: A member of the permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power the distinction of massive continuity: First as CIA director under George H.W. Bush, second as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and third as Obama’s secretary of defense. He remained for 28 months and departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in 2009 to promote a major (called “moderate”) escalation of the Afghan War; yet he did so without rancor or posturing -- a style Obama trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen U.S. militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalization.
His approach has been endorsed and will be continued -- though probably with less canniness -- by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a different species: the adaptable choice for “running things” without regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion of the Clinton White House, he is associated in the public mind with no set of views or policies.
3. Rahm Emanuel: As Obama’s White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel’s ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House. Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed out anti-war candidates.
Obama would have known this, and admired the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy in the 2010 midterm elections has never been looked into. Anyway, the fact that the category “anti-war Democrat” hardly exists in 2011 is an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.
4. Cass Sunstein: Widely thought to be the president’s most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise (as senator) to filibuster any new law awarding amnesty to the telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama’s first major reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended the integrity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) against the secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).
At that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. In his awkward public defense of the switch, Obama suggested that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to restore the rule of law.
When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney’s Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities. “By historical standards,” he wrote in the fall of 2004, “the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act, at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as it stood before its enactment.” This seems to have become Obama’s view.
Charity toward the framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action against the “torture lawyers.” Sunstein described the Bush Justice Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short of legal condemnation: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless." Bad lawyering: a professional fault but not an actionable offense.
The Obama policy of declining to hold any high official or even CIA interrogators accountable for violations of the law by the preceding administration would likely not have survived opposition by Sunstein. A promise not to prosecute, however, has been implicit in the findings by the Obama Justice Department -- a promise that was made explicit by Leon Panetta in February 2009 when he had just been named President Obama’s new director of the CIA.
As head of the president’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, with an office in the White House, Sunstein adjudicates government policy on issues of worker and consumer safety; yet his title suggests a claim of authority on issues such as the data-mining of information about American citizens and the government’s deployment of a state secrets privilege. He deserves wider attention, too, for his 2008 proposal that the government “cognitively infiltrate” discussion groups on-line and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the government judges to be extreme or misleading.
5. Eric Holder: Holder once said that the trial of suspected 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom would be “the defining event of my time as attorney general.” The decision to make KSM’s a civilian trial was, however, scuttled, thanks to incompetent management at the White House: neither the first nor last failure of its kind. The policy of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts seems to have suffered from never being wholeheartedly embraced by the administration’s inside actors. Local resistance by the New York authorities was the ostensible reason for the failure and the change of venue back to a military tribunal at Guantanamo. No member of the administration besides Holder has been observed to show much regret.
During his 30-month tenure, in keeping with Obama’s willingness to overlook the unpleasant history of CIA renditions and “extreme interrogations,” Holder has made no move to prosecute any upper-level official of any of the big banks and money firms responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. His silence on the subject has been taken as a signal that such prosecutions will never occur. To judge by public statements, the energies of the attorney general, in an administration that arrived under the banner of bringing “sunshine” and “transparency” to Washington, have mainly been dedicated to the prosecution of government whistle-blowers through a uniquely rigorous application of the Espionage Act of 1917. More people have been accused under that law by this attorney general than in the entire preceding 93 years of the law’s existence.
Again, this is a focus that Bush-era attorneys general John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey might have relished, but on which none would have dared to act so boldly. Extraordinary delays in grand jury proceedings on Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of providing government secrets to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, who ran that website, are said to have come from a protracted attempt to secure a legal hold against one or both potential defendants within the limits of a barbarous and almost dormant law.
6. Dennis Ross: Earlier in his career, Obama seems to have cherished an interest in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In Chicago, he was a friend of the dissident Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi; during his 2007 primary campaign, he sought and received advice from Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Both were “realist” opponents of the expansionist policy of Israel’s right-wing coalition government, which subsidizes and affords military protection to Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Under pressure from the Israel lobby, Obama dissociated himself from all three chosen advisers.
Ross, as surely as Gates, is a member of Washington’s permanent establishment. Recruited for the Carter Defense Department by Paul Wolfowitz, he started out as a Soviet specialist, but his expertise migrated with a commission to undertake a Limited Contingency Study on the need for American defense of the Persian Gulf. An American negotiator at the 2000 Camp David summit, Ross was accused of being an unfair broker, having always “started from the Israeli bottom line.”
He entered the Obama administration as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton on the Persian Gulf, but was moved into the White House on June 25, 2009, and outfitted with an elaborate title and comprehensive duties: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, including all of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. Ross has cautioned Obama to be “sensitive” to domestic Israeli concerns.
In retrospect, his installation in the White House looks like the first step in a pattern of concessions to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that undid Obama’s hopes for an agreement in the region. Here, caution precluded all inventiveness. It could have been predicted that the ascendancy of Ross would render void the two-state solution Obama anticipated in his carefully prepared and broadly advertised speech to the Arab world from Cairo University in June 2009.
7. Peter Orszag: Director of the Office of Management and Budget from January 2009 to August 2010, Orszag was charged with bringing in the big health insurers to lay out what it would take for them to support the president’s health-care law. In this way, Orszag -- along with the companies -- exerted a decisive influence on the final shape of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In January 2011, he left the administration to become vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup. A few days out of the White House, he published an op-ed in the New York Times advising the president to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans -- adding that Obama should indicate that the cuts would continue in force only through 2012. Obama took the advice.
8. Thomas Donilon: National Security Adviser and (after the departure of Gates) Obama’s closest consultant on foreign policy. Donilon supported the 34,000 troop-escalation order that followed the president’s inconclusive 2009 Afghanistan War review. He encouraged and warmly applauded Obama’s non-binding “final orders” on Afghanistan, which all the participants in the 2009 review were asked formally to approve. (The final orders speak of “a prioritized comprehensive approach” by which the U.S. will “work with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai when we can” to set “the conditions for an accelerated transition,” to bring about “effective sub-national governance,” and to “transfer” the responsibility for fighting the war while continuing to “degrade” enemy forces.)
Donilon comes from the worlds of business, the law, and government in about equal measure: a versatile career spanning many orthodoxies. His open and unreserved admiration for President Obama seems to have counted more heavily in his appointment than the low opinion of his qualifications apparently held by several associates. As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration, he helped arrange the eastward expansion of NATO after the Cold War: perhaps the most pointless and destructive bipartisan project of the epoch. He was Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae, 1999-2005.
The Sacked
Advisers and nominees with views that were in line with Obama's 2008 election campaign or his professed goals in 2009, but who have since been fired, asked to resign or step down, or seen their nominations dropped:
1. General James Jones: Former Marine Corps Commandant and a skeptic of the Afghanistan escalation, Jones became the president’s first National Security Adviser. He was, however, often denied meetings with Obama, who seems to have looked on Gates as a superior technocrat, Petraeus as a more prestigious officer, and Donilon as a more fervent believer in the split-the-difference war and diplomatic policies Obama elected to pursue. Jones resigned in October 2010, under pressure.
A curious point: Obama had spoken to Jones only twice before appointing him to so high a post and seems hardly to have come to know him by the time he resigned.
2. Karl Eikenberry: Commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan before he was made ambassador, Eikenberry, a retired Lieutenant General, had seniority over both Petraeus and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal when it came to experience in that country and theater of war. He was the author of cables to the State Department in late 2009, which carried a stinging rebuke to the conduct of the war and unconcealed hostility toward any new policy of escalation. The Eikenberry cables were drafted in order to influence the White House review that fall; they advised that the Afghan war was in the process of being lost, that it could never be won, and that nothing good would come from an increased commitment of U.S. troops.
Petraeus, then Centcom commander, and McChrystal were both disturbed by the cables -- startled when they arrived unbidden and intimidated by their authority. Obama, astonishingly, chose to ignore them. This may be the single most baffling occasion of the many when fate dealt a winning card to the president and yet he folded. Among other such occasions: the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and the opening for financial regulation; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the opportunity for a revised environmental policy; the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns and a revised policy toward nuclear energy; the Goldstone Report and the chance for an end to the Gaza blockade. But of all these as well as other cases that might be mentioned, the Eikenberry cables offer the clearest instance of persisting in a discredited policy against the weight of impressive evidence.
Ambassador Eikenberry retired in 2011, and Obama replaced him with Ryan Crocker -- the Foreign Service officer brought into Iraq by Bush to help General Petraeus manage the details and publicity around the Iraq surge of 2007-2008.
3. Paul Volcker: Head of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Volker had a record (not necessarily common among upper-echelon workers in finance) entirely free of the reproach of venality. A steady adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign, he lent gravity to the young candidate's professions of competence in financial matters. He also counseled Obama against the one-sidedness of a recovery policy founded on repayment guarantees to financial outfits such as Citigroup and Bank of America: the policy, that is, favored by Summers and Geithner in preference to massive job creation and a major investment in infrastructure. "If you want to be a bank,” he said, “follow the bank rules. If Goldman Sachs and the others want to do proprietary trading, then they shouldn’t be banks.” His advice -- to tighten regulation in order to curb speculative trading -- was adopted late and in diluted form. In January 2010, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal taxes that year, replaced him.
4. Dennis Blair: As Director of National Intelligence, Blair sought to limit the expansion of covert operations by the CIA. In this quest he was defeated by CIA Director Leon Panetta -- a seasoned infighter, though without any experience in intelligence, who successfully enlarged the Agency’s prerogatives and limited oversight of its activities during his tenure. Blair refused to resign when Obama asked him to, and demanded to be fired. He finally stepped down on May 21, 2010.
Doubtless Blair hurt his prospects irreparably by making clear to the president his skepticism regarding the usefulness of drone warfare: a form of killing Obama favors as the most politic and antiseptic available to the U.S. Since being sacked, Blair has come out publicly against the broad use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.
On his way out, he was retrospectively made a scapegoat for the November 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, killing spree by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan; for the “underwear” bomber’s attempt to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit on Christmas day 2009; and for the failed Times Square car bombing of May 2010 -- all attacks (it was implied) that Blair should have found the missing key to avert, even though the Army, the FBI, and the CIA were unable to do so.
5. James Cartwright: As vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright passed on to Obama, and interpreted for him, a good deal of information that proved useful in the Afghanistan War review. Their friendship outlasted the process and he came to be known as Obama’s “favorite general,” but Cartwright stirred the resentment of both Petraeus and Mullen for establishing a separate channel of influence with the president. Like Eikenberry, he had been a skeptic on the question of further escalation in Afghanistan. His name was floated by the White House as the front-runner to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after the retirement of Mullen. Informed of the military opposition to the appointment, Obama reversed field and chose Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, a figure more agreeable to Petraeus and Mullen.
6. Dawn Johnsen: Obama’s first choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel -- a choice generally praised and closely watched by constitutional lawyers and civil libertarians. Her name was withdrawn after a 14-month wait, and she was denied a confirmation process. The cause: Republican objections to her writings and her public statements against the practice of torture and legal justifications for torture.
This reversal falls in with a larger pattern: the putting forward of candidates for government positions whose views are straightforward, publicly available, and consistent with the pre-2009 principles of Barack Obama -- followed by Obama’s withdrawal of support for the same candidates. A more recent instance was the naming (after considerable delay) of Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, followed by the decision in July not to nominate her as the first director of the bureau.
Avoidance of a drag-out fight in confirmation hearings seems to be the recurrent motive here. Of course, the advantage of such a fight, given an articulate and willing nominee, is the education of public opinion. But in every possible instance, President Obama has been averse to any public engagement in the clash of ideas. “Bottom line is that it was going to be close,” a Senate Democratic source told the ABC reporter Jake Tapper when Johnsen’s name was withdrawn. "If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a vote. But they didn't want to 'cause they didn't have the stomach for the debate."
Where the nomination of an “extreme” candidate has hardened a wrong impression of Obama as an extremist, might not a public hearing help to eradicate the very preconception that every tactical withdrawal tends to confirm? This question is not asked.
7. Greg Craig: For two years special counsel in the Clinton White House, he led the team defending the president in the impeachment proceedings in Congress. Craig’s declaration of support for Obama in March 2007 was vital to the insurgent candidate, because of his well-known loyalty to the Clintons. Obama made him White House Counsel, and his initial task was to draw up plans for the closing of Guantanamo: a promise made by the president on his first day in the Oval Office. But once the paper was signed, Obama showed little interest in the developing plans. Others were more passionate. Dick Cheney worked on a susceptible populace to resurrect old fears. The forces against closure rallied and spread panic, while the president said nothing. Craig was defeated inside the White House by the “realist” Rahm Emanuel, and sacked.
8. Carol Browner: A leading environmentalist in the Clinton administration, Browner was given a second shot by Obama as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy. She found her efforts thwarted within the administration as well as in Congress: in mid-2010 Obama decided that -- as a way to deal with global warming -- cap-and-trade legislation was a loser for the midterm elections. Pressure on Obama from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to heed business interests served as a strong incitement in forcing Browner’s resignation after the democratic “shellacking” in midterm elections: a result that his abandonment of cap-and-trade had failed to prevent. The White House had no backup plan for addressing the disaster of global warming. After Browner’s resignation in March 2011, her position was abolished. Since then, Obama has seldom spoken of global warming or climate change.
Moral and Political Limbo
The Obama presidency has been characterized by a refined sense of impossibility. A kind of suffocation sets in when a man of power floats carefully clear of all unorthodox stimuli and resorts to official comforters of the sort exemplified by Panetta. As the above partial list of the saved and the sacked shows, the president lives now in a world in which he is certain never to be told he is wrong when he happens to be on the wrong track. It is a world where the unconventionality of an opinion, or the existence of a possible majority opposed to it somewhere, counts as prima facie evidence against its soundness.
So alternative ideas vanish -- along with the people who represent them. What, then, does President Obama imagine he is doing as he backs into one weak appointment after another, and purges all signs of thought and independence around him? We have a few dim clues.
A popular book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, seems to have prompted Obama to suppose that Lincoln himself “led from behind” and was committed to bipartisanship not only as a tactic but as an always necessary means to the highest good of democracy. A more wishful conceit was never conceived; but Obama has talked of the book easily and often to support a “pragmatic” instinct for constant compromise that he believes himself to share with the American people and with Lincoln.
A larger hint may come from Obama’s recently released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the president’s own voice asserts: "We face the world as it is, but we will also pursue a strategy for the world we seek." If the words "I face the world as it is" have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received a trial run in Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.
Indeed, Obama’s understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that "there's serious evil in the world" -- a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr -- combined with the assertion that he is ready to "face the world as it is." The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework of ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.
This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase. It explains, as nothing else does, Obama’s enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.
Obama’s pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order -- any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on “seeking.” Therefore, in “the world as it is,” you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended by adopting. Their difference from you is that they lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are normally found in places of power.
David Bromwich writes on civil liberties and America's wars for the Huffington Post. A TomDispatch regular, as well as contributor to the New York Review of Books, his latest essay, "How Lincoln Explained Democracy," appeared recently in the Yale Review.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
by JackRiddler » Sun Aug 28, 2011 6:27 pm
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html
Thursday, Aug 25, 2011 09:26 ET
The fruits of elite immunity
By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below - Update II [Fri.])
Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted -- and further enriched -- as a Wise and Serious Statesman with the release of his memoirs this week: one in which he proudly boasts (yet again) of the very crimes for which he was immunized. As he embarks on his massive publicity-generating media tour of interviews, Cheney faces no indictments or criminal juries, but rather reverent, rehabilitative tributes, illustrated by this, from Politico today:
That's what happens when the Government -- marching under the deceitful Orwellian banner of Look Forward, Not Backward -- demands that its citizens avert their eyes from the crimes of their leaders so that all can be forgotten: the crimes become non-crimes, legitimate acts of political choice, and the criminals become instantly rehabilitated by the message that nothing they did warrants punishment. That's the same reason people like John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are defending their torture and illegal spying actions not in a courtroom but in a lush conference of elites in Aspen.
The U.S. Government loves to demand that other countries hold their political leaders accountable for serious crimes, dispensing lectures on the imperatives of the rule of law. Numerous states bar ordinary convicts from profiting from their crimes with books. David Hicks, an Australian citizen imprisoned without charges for six years at Cheney's Guantanamo, just had $10,000 seized by the Australian government in revenue from his book about his time in that prison camp on the ground that he is barred from profiting from his uncharged, unproven crimes.
By rather stark contrast, Dick Cheney will prance around the next several weeks in the nation's largest media venues, engaging in civil, Serious debates about whether he was right to invade other countries, torture, and illegally spy on Americans, and will profit greatly by doing so. There are many factors accounting for his good fortune, the most important of which are the protective shield of immunity bestowed upon him by the current administration and the more generalized American principle that criminal accountability is only for ordinary citizens and other nations' (unfriendly) rulers.
by Nordic » Mon Aug 29, 2011 5:00 pm
by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Aug 29, 2011 9:15 pm
Nordic wrote:I said it when Karl Rove was on his book tour, and I'm saying it again now -- the fact that the likes of Dick Cheney can go out in public, to do book signings and whatnot, with a bare minimum security detail means that there is absolutely ZERO "terrorist" threat in the United States. Zero.
by JackRiddler » Thu Sep 08, 2011 8:51 pm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/0 ... etail=hide
Obama Advisors Feared a Coup if the Administration Prosecuted War Crimes
by
RogerShuler
Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer
Advisors for President-Elect Barack Obama feared the new administration would face a coup if it prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a new report out this morning.
Christopher Edley Jr., law dean at the University of California and a high-ranking member of the Obama transition team, made the revelation during a 9/11 forum at his law school on September 2. Andrew Kreig, director of the D.C.-based Justice Integrity Project, reports that Edley's comments were in response to questions from Susan Harman, a long-time California peace advocate.
Edley apparently tried to justify Obama's "look forward, not backwards" policy toward Bush-era lawbreaking. Instead, Kreig writes, Edley revealed the Obama team's weakness in the face of Republican thuggery:Edley's rationale implies that Obama and his team fear the military/national security forces that he is supposed be commanding--and that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even though voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history. Edley responded to our request for additional information by providing a description of the transition team's fears, which we present below as an exclusive email interview. Among his important points is that transition officials, not Obama, agreed that he faced the possibility of a coup.
In their prepared remarks, speakers at the Cal law school, known as Boalt Hall, repeatedly called for accountability and support for the rule of law. Based on the Obama administration's record on justice issues, Harman said she found the comments "surreal."
Former Bush Justice Department official John C. Yoo, known as the "torture memo lawyer," serves as a faculty member at Boalt Hall, perhaps making the occasion seem even more surreal.
Harman decided to ask some tough questions--and she received news-making answers. Reports Kreig:Edley responded that Obama’s team feared that leadership in the U.S. armed forces, the CIA and NSA might “revolt” if the new Obama administration prosecuted war crimes by U.S. authorities and lower-ranking personnel. Also, Edley told Harman that his fellow decision-makers on Obama's team feared that a prosecution inquiry could lead to Republican efforts to thwart the Obama agenda in Congress.
Harman shared this account by email and Google Groups with our Justice Integrity Project and others. Among recipients was David Swanson, an antiwar activist who since last January has been organizing a grassroots effort to replace Obama on the Democratic 2012 ticket.
Here is Harman's account of what transpired on September 2:I said I was overwhelmed by the surreality of Yoo being on the law faculty . . . when he was singlehandedly responsible for the three worst policies of the Bush Administration. They all burbled about academic freedom and the McCarthy era, and said it isn’t their job to prosecute him. Duh.
Then Dean Chris Edley volunteered that he’d been party to very high-level discussions during Obama’s transition about prosecuting the criminals. He said they decided against it. I asked why. Two reasons: 1) it was thought that the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt, and 2) it was thought the Repugnants would retaliate by blocking every piece of legislation they tried to move (which, of course, they’ve done anyhow).
Afterwards I told him that CIA friends confirmed that Obama would have been in danger, but I added that he bent over backwards to protect the criminals, and gave as an example the DOJ’s defense (state secrets) of Jeppesen (the rendition arm of Boeing) a few days after his inauguration.
He shrugged and said they will never be prosecuted, and that sometimes politics trumps rule of law.
“It must not," I said.
“It shouldn’t," he said, and walked off.
This is the Dean of the Berkeley School of Law.
Kreig sought a response from Edley, who confirmed the comments that Harman reported. Here are several points Edley made in his written reply:Thanks for the opportunity.
1. You can read about the Miller Institute at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/.... The faculty cochairs of it are me and Prof. David Caron, who also happens to be Honorary President of the American Society of International Law. I don't know why Ms. Harman thinks Professor Yoo has received a "promotion" or special position.
2. I didn't hear anyone burbling. I think the panelists, along with me, were perfectly cogent and articulate. I've also written about it to my students and alumni several times. Ms. Harman strongly disagrees. She did not specifically engage our points about academic freedom, including the McCarthy era precedents. Those examples are especially important to Californians for whom the ugliness of that era had special significance for Hollywood and state universities. Remember, too, that Berkeley was the home of the Free Speech Movement.
3. Ms. Harman accurately conveyed the substance of my comment about the Obama Transition. I'd add three points: I never discussed these matters with the President Elect; the summary offered by one of the senior national security folks was, "We don't want to engage in a witch hunt," to which I replied, "Neither do I, but I also care about the Rule of Law and, whether or not there ultimately are prosecutions, the question of whether laws were broken and where the lines should be drawn deserve to be aired"; that discussion as a whole was brief.
4. My point about politics is simple and non-controversial to people trained in law. I was not referring to politics trumping Law in the sense of President Nixon thinking he could do anything he wanted with respect to the Watergate scandal. I was referring to what every first year law student learns about prosecutorial discretion and the political accountability of prosecutors, which the "system" assumes will be a check on prosecutorial abuses more often than a source of them.
5. A frustrating thing to me about these discussions is that non-academics don't seem particularly to appreciate the fragility and importance of academic freedom. A university isn't equipped or competent to do a factual investigation of what took place at DOJ or in secret White House meetings. Nor should it make judgments about what faculty do outside of their professorial duties when there is no evident impermissible impact on their teaching. (For Professor Yoo, there is none.) The right forum investigating and punishing alleged crimes is in the criminal justice system, not a research university. Our job is already tough enough.
6. Finally, another frustrating thing is that advocates are often fierce in their belief that they know what the law is, and they know when someone else's view is extreme. Your typical law professor is, I think, far more humble. We tend to see multiple sides to important issues, and lots of gray. Even if we are convinced of something, we work hard to understand the counterarguments, just to be sure. If there aren't any, then MAYBE one could characterize the other position as extreme. My guess is that Professor Yoo's constitutional theories and statutory interpretation would win at least three votes among current justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. I don't like it, but that's my reading of the caselaw. Does 3 out of 9 make it extreme? If so, then a lot of my heroes are or were "extreme."
by JackRiddler » Fri Jan 20, 2012 3:13 pm
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/19/u ... re-trials/
U.N. complaint alleges illegal pressure on Spain to stop Bush torture trials
By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, January 19, 2012
A complaint filed Thursday with the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers alleges that the United States and the government of Spain colluded to stop the Spanish judiciary from prosecuting U.S. figures for torture under a legal theory construct known as universal jurisdiction.
Those individuals that Spanish courts sought to prosecute included six former Bush administration attorneys who approved the use of torture tactics in enemy interrogations. The U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed the complaint with the help of the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).
The allegations of improper influence on Spain’s judiciary spring from a collection of 14 U.S. embassy cables (PDF) authored by the Bush and Obama administrations, revealed by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
“[We] submit that the U.S. diplomatic cables – the key documents of which are annexed to this complaint – demonstrate a coordinated effort, led by U.S. officials and involving certain senior members of the Spanish government, to obstruct and otherwise interfere with the outcome of these three cases,” the complaint reads. “We maintain that the aim of this concerted action was to prejudice the outcome of these cases in favor of the defendants and thereby subvert the course of justice in Spain.”
Both groups also demanded that the U.S. and Spanish officials cease efforts to influence the judiciary, and requested that the U.N. rapporteur investigate the case. Spanish law, they said, allows local courts to exercise jurisdiction over international crimes if “there was no other competent country or international tribunal where proceedings have been initiated that constitute an effective investigation and prosecution in relation to the punishable facts.”
The doctrine of universal jurisdiction is also upheld in international law by countries like the U.S., Mexico, the U.K., Canada, Germany, France and others, which typically comply with extradition requests for offenders who are convicted by courts abroad.
“The WikiLeaks cables reveal that the United States will go to extreme measures to ensure that U.S. officials are not called before a court of law to answer the torture allegations against them,” CCR Senior Attorney Katherine Gallagher explained in a media advisory. “Unfortunately, in Spain they found Spanish officials willing to work with them to keep justice from being done. We hope the Special Rapporteur will examine the serious breaches of international law detailed in our complaint, and that those who suffered under the U.S. torture program can pursue justice, without interference, in Spain and elsewhere.”
Stephen C. Webster
Stephen C. Webster is the senior editor of Raw Story, and is based out of Austin, Texas. He previously worked as the associate editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford, Texas, where he covered state politics and the peace movement’s resurgence at the start of the Iraq war. Webster has also contributed to publications such as True/Slant, Austin Monthly, The Dallas Business Journal, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Weekly, The News Connection and others. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenCWebster.
by eyeno » Sat Jan 21, 2012 6:50 pm
by JackRiddler » Fri Jul 25, 2014 7:10 pm
Bush Administration Lawsuit Hearing Scheduled for Sept. 11th
Posted by Quiet Mike on Friday, July 25, 2014 · 2 Comments
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025289785
If all goes well, the announcement of a start date to the Bush Administration trial could be just six weeks away.
Last summer, Inder Comar, Esq. filed a lawsuit against the Bush Administration on behalf of Iraqi refugee plaintiff Sundus Shaker Saleh. It is a noble attempt to hold the Bush Administration accountable for war crimes and a case that Quiet Mike has been following from the beginning.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice, who is defending the six Bush Administration officials, responded to the lawsuit by requesting that the case be dismissed. The Bush tribe is claiming that the planning of the war occurred within the scope of their employment and therefore they have immunity.
Rather than dismissing the case, the Judge asked for additional information. So Mr. Comar filed a 2nd amended complaint back in June.
The amended complaint provides more details about the planning of the Iraq war and when it started.
Comar’s evidence, shows the Bush/Cheney team started planning the invasion of Iraq as far back as 1997. The amended complaint also explains that the war was motivated by personal enrichment and the war was a “crime of aggression.”
Earlier this week. Inder Comar got his chance in court to respond to the motion to dismiss and explain the 2nd amended complaint further. He essentially made two points to the court.
The first argument he made was something called judicial estoppel. It prevents a party from taking a position in a case which is contrary to a position they have taken in earlier legal proceedings. In this case, Comar used the Nuremburg Trials as an example.
The Nuremburg Trials, which the United States views as legitimate, held Nazi leaders accountable for their acts of aggression. Comar held that judicial estoppel dictates the Bush Administration and DOJ can’t argue that leaders aren’t accountable for acts of aggression because it runs contrary to the US’s position at Nuremburg.
The second point that was made referred to the Augusto Pinochet trial. In 1999, British Lawyers determined that Pinochet did not have immunity for certain acts he committed while in office such as torture and other violations of international law. These Brits held that Pinochet was not immune because Chile had signed the convention against torture.
In light of the treaties and charters that the United States has signed, Comar stated that the defence can’t now claim that acts of aggression are above a leader’s authority. In this case, the Bush Administration.
What does all this mean? On August 15th, the United States will have the opportunity to respond to the second amended complaint.
In the meantime, a hearing is scheduled for September 11th, of all dates. If the hearing goes ahead as scheduled, and if all else goes well, the announcement of a start date in the trial to hold the Bush Administration accountable could be just six weeks away.
If you are hearing about this case for the first time, you can follow its progress on Witness Iraq. You can also read up with our past articles. Please spread the word, too few people are even aware of Mr. Comar’s efforts. This case deserves all our support.
A Saleh v. Bush Lawsuit Update May 29 2014
Inder Comar: The Man Behind the Bush Administration Lawsuit August 15th 2013
The Bush Administration on Trial June 16 2013
by justdrew » Fri Jul 25, 2014 8:47 pm
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 01, 2014 8:29 am
Bush Administration Lawsuit Hearing Scheduled for Sept. 11th
Posted by Quiet Mike on Friday, July 25, 2014 · 137 Comments
If all goes well, the announcement of a start date to the Bush Administration trial could be just six weeks away
bush administration lawsuitLast summer, Inder Comar, Esq. filed a lawsuit against the Bush Administration on behalf of Iraqi refugee plaintiff Sundus Shaker Saleh. It is a noble attempt to hold the Bush Administration accountable for war crimes and a case that Quiet Mike has been following from the beginning.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice, who is defending the six Bush Administration officials, responded to the lawsuit by requesting that the case be dismissed. The Bush tribe is claiming that the planning of the war occurred within the scope of their employment and therefore they have immunity.
Rather than dismissing the case, the Judge asked for additional information. So Mr. Comar filed a 2nd amended complaint back in June. The amended complaint provides more details about the planning of the Iraq war and when it started.
Comar’s evidence, shows the Bush/Cheney team started planning the invasion of Iraq as far back as 1997. The amended complaint also explains that the war was motivated by personal enrichment and the war was a “crime of aggression.”
Earlier this week. Inder Comar got his chance in court to respond to the motion to dismiss and explain the 2nd amended complaint further. He essentially made two points to the court.
The first argument he made was something called judicial estoppel. It prevents a party from taking a position in a case which is contrary to a position they have taken in earlier legal proceedings. In this case, Comar used the Nuremburg Trials as an example.
The Nuremburg Trials, which the United States views as legitimate, held Nazi leaders accountable for their acts of aggression. Comar held that judicial estoppel dictates the Bush Administration and DOJ can’t argue that leaders aren’t accountable for acts of aggression because it runs contrary to the US’s position at Nuremburg.
The second point that was made referred to the Augusto Pinochet trial. In 1999, British Lawyers determined that Pinochet did not have immunity for certain acts he committed while in office such as torture and other violations of international law. These Brits held that Pinochet was not immune because Chile had signed the convention against torture.
In light of the treaties and charters that the United States has signed, Comar stated that the defence can’t now claim that acts of aggression are above a leader’s authority. In this case, the Bush Administration.
What does all this mean? On August 15th, the United States will have the opportunity to respond to the second amended complaint. In the meantime, a hearing is scheduled for September 11th, of all dates. If the hearing goes ahead as scheduled, and if all else goes well, the announcement of a start date in the trial to hold the Bush Administration accountable could be just six weeks away.
If you are hearing about this case for the first time, you can follow its progress on Witness Iraq. You can also read up with our past articles. Please spread the word, too few people are even aware of Mr. Comar’s efforts. This case deserves all our support.
A Saleh v. Bush Lawsuit Update May 29 2014
Inder Comar: The Man Behind the Bush Administration Lawsuit August 15th 2013
The Bush Administration on Trial June 16 2013
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