Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Saturday, April 30, 2005
British military chief reveals new legal fears over Iraq war
The man who led Britain's armed forces into Iraq has said that Tony Blair and the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, will join British soldiers in the dock if the military are ever prosecuted for war crimes in Iraq.
In a remarkably frank interview that goes to the heart of the political row over the Attorney General's legal advice, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the former Chief of the Defence Staff, said he did not have full legal cover from prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
'If my soldiers went to jail and I did, some other people would go with me,' said Boyce.
In his most detailed explanation yet of why he demanded an unequivocal assurance from lawyers that the war was legal, he said: 'I wanted to make sure that we had this anchor which has been signed by the government law officer ...
'It may not stop us from being charged, but, by God, it would make sure other people were brought into the frame as well.'
Pressed by The Observer on whether he meant the Prime Minister and the Attorney General, Boyce replied: 'Too bloody right.'
The admiral added that he had never been shown the crucial 7 March advice by Goldsmith that questioned whether the war was legal. He had only been given a later assurance of legality, which contained none of the caveats. It was only after he questioned Number 10 about legal 'top cover' that he was given Goldsmith's opinion.
Boyce has consistently said he believed the war was legal and morally justified. But, asked whether the government had provided him with the legal cover necessary to avoid prosecution for war crimes, he replied: 'No.'
He added: 'I think I have done as best as I can do. I have always been troubled by the ICC. Although I was reassured ... when [discussions over signing up to the ICC were] going through Whitehall about five years ago, I was patted on the head and told: "Don't worry, on the day it will be fine." I don't have 100 per cent confidence in that.'
In a further damaging development for the government, documents leaked to a Sunday newspaper appeared to show that Tony Blair was considering military action to topple Saddam Hussein as early as 2002.
According to minutes from a meeting held in Downing Street on 23 July, obtained by the Sunday Times, the assumption had been made that 'the UK would take part in any military action' initiated by the United States.
Blair said it 'would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors.' He added: 'If the political context were right, people would support regime change.'
The minutes confirm that the Attorney General did not believe regime change was a basis for military action.
A further confidential document leaked this weekend is the Foreign Office legal opinion that expressed grave doubts about the legality of war without a second UN resolution.
An Observer investigation into the legal ramifications of the war also reveals that Goldsmith's advice authorising war was shaped after meeting the five most powerful Republican lawyers in the Bush administration, in February 2003.
These included Alberto Gonzales, Bush's controversial chief legal adviser who has been at the centre of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. Gonzales once famously described elements of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war as 'quaint'.
The four other lawyers were William Taft IV, chief legal adviser to the then Secretary of State Colin Powell; Jim Haynes, chief legal adviser to Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon; John Bellinger, chief legal adviser to Condoleezza Rice; and the then US Attorney General, John Ashcroft.
Speaking to The Observer from his Virginia home, Taft explained how the US argument that a second UN resolution was not needed before invading Iraq was put to an undecided Goldsmith. Taft said: 'I will say when we heard about his statement in Parliament [on 17 March] ... what he said sounded very familiar.'
Last week, the government was forced to disclose the 13-page legal document, drawn up by Goldsmith on 7 March, following leaks to the media. This revealed the importance of Goldsmith's trip to Washington, which provided the backbone of the 'reasonable case' for war without a second UN resolution.
In paragraph 23 of his 7 March advice, Goldsmith said: 'I was impressed by the strength and sincerity of the views of the US administration which I heard in Washington.'
In contrast to his 'unequivocal' legal authority for war given to Parliament 10 days later, this document revealed Goldsmith's misgivings over the legality of the war without a UN resolution.
Neither ministers nor Parliament were shown the complete advice, leading to claims they were misled into backing the war. The revelation that the man in charge of Britain's armed forces was also not shown the advice has been described as 'staggering' by Philippe Sands QC, an expert in international law.
Boyce told The Observer: 'I didn't see it - it was not copied to me.'
Last night, government sources confirmed that Goldsmith met the five Washington lawyers on 11 February 2003. A spokeswoman for the Attorney General said he had travelled to Washington to listen to American opinion and had not been pressured to change his view on the war.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Commanders Responsible for Abu Ghraib
The responsibility ultimately lies with President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel, who decided that the Geneva Conventions on Humanitarian Treatment of Prisoners of War didn't apply in the "war on terrorism."
Among the military hierarchy, only Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve officer who commanded the military police unit at Abu Ghraib, has paid a price. Karpinski, who was relieved of her command and given a written reprimand, claims she is a "scapegoat" and plans to fight the charge.
... In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Karpinski pointed to the role of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been sent from his duty at the Guantanamo Bay, prison -- known as "gitmo" -- to Iraq where his orders were to "gitmoize" Abu Ghraib. Miller told officers there "to treat the prisoners like dogs."
... Civil rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union, are appalled at the Green report.
Human Rights Watch has called on Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the roles of all U.S. officials "who participated in, ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture."
The human rights group also called for a bipartisan probe -- similar to the 9/11 commission investigation -- to look into the roles of Bush, Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet.
"We believe that if the U.S. is going to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib, it needs to investigate those at the top who ordered or condoned abuse, and to come clean on what the president has authorized and repudiate once and for all the mistreatment of detainees in the war on terror," said Reed Brody, Human Rights Watch special counsel.
He said the fact that you have the same kinds of abuses going on in three different theaters (Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo) suggests that the responsibility is higher up. The civil rights groups said the military appears to be incapable of investigating itself.
Lawyer Who Told of US Abuses at Afghan Bases Loses UN Post
A United Nations human rights monitor who accused American military forces and civilian contractors last week of abusing and torturing prisoners in Afghanistan has been told his job is over.
M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago who was the human rights commission's independent expert for Afghanistan, said Friday that he had received an e-mail message from a commission official in Geneva a week ago telling him his mandate had expired.
The day before, he had released a 21-page report saying that Americans running prisons in Afghanistan had acted above the law "by engaging in arbitrary arrests and detentions and committing abusive practices, including torture."
... "My guess is that torture will go down at the U.S. facilities, but what will go up is torture at the Afghan facilities. It's the usual shell game. The U.S. feels the heat, it tries to discontinue the practice itself, but it finds special forces in the Afghan Army to do its bidding."
How Ally With Abuse Record Became a Surrogate U.S. Jailer
Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.
The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly: "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."
Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in the global fight against terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.
Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.
The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terror suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism of Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens.
There is other evidence of the United States' reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes - a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 - landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by The New York Times.
Although the precise purpose of those flights is not known, over a span of about three years, from late 2001 until early this year, the C.I.A. used those two planes to ferry terror suspects in American custody to countries around the world for questioning, according to interviews with former and current intelligence officials and flight logs showing the movements of the planes. On the day the planes landed in Tashkent, the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic, the logs show.
The logs show at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan by those planes from early 2002 to late 2003, but the records are incomplete.
Details of the C.I.A.'s prisoner transfer program have emerged in recent months from a handful of former detainees who have been released, primarily from prisons in Egypt and Afghanistan, and in some cases have alleged they were beaten and tortured while being held.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Energy Imbalance Behind Global Warming
Climate change has been looked at from many angles. Here's another twist: Scientists have determined that more energy is being absorbed from the Sun than our planet reflects back to space.
This energy imbalance, the researchers said today, confirms other predictions that Earth's climate will warm by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 Celsius) by the end of this century.
The study is based on satellite data and computer models. It precisely measured ocean heat content over the past decade. The imbalance is due to increased air pollution, especially carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that act like a see-through blanket, letting sunlit in but trapping the heat it generates.
In scientific terms, the imbalance is 0.85 watts per square meter. It's equal to nature shining an extra 1-watt light bulb on every desk-sized patch of the planet.
It all adds up. If the imbalance were maintained for 10,000 years, it would melt enough ice to raise the oceans by six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer), the scientists said.
The analysis lends support to the contentious idea that humans are contributing to the warming trend by burning gas, coal and other fossil fuels that generate greenhouse gases.
"This energy imbalance is the 'smoking gun' that we have been looking for," said lead researcher James Hansen, director of
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. "It shows that our estimates of the human-made and natural climate forcing agents are about right, and they are driving the Earth toward a warmer climate." The study is detailed in the online version of the journal Science.
Monday, April 25, 2005
The Oblivious Right
Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns.
The administration's upbeat view of the economy is a case in point. Corporate interests are doing very well. As a recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, over the last three years profits grew at an annual rate of 14.5 percent after inflation, the fastest growth since World War II.
The story is very different for the great majority of Americans, who live off their wages, not dividends or capital gains, and aren't doing well at all. Over the past three years, wage and salary income grew less than in any other postwar recovery - less than a tenth as fast as profits. But wage-earning Americans aren't part of the base.
The same obliviousness explains Mr. Bush's decision to make Social Security privatization his main policy priority. He doesn't talk to anyone outside the base, so he didn't realize what he was getting into.
In retrospect, it was a terrible political blunder: the privatization campaign has quickly degenerated from juggernaut to joke. According to CBS, only 25 percent of the public have confidence in Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about Social Security; 70 percent are "uneasy."
The point is that people sense, correctly, that Mr. Bush doesn't understand their concerns. He was sold on privatization by people who have made their careers in the self-referential, corporate-sponsored world of conservative think tanks. And he himself has no personal experience with the risks that working families face. He's probably never imagined what it would be like to be destitute in his old age, with no guaranteed income.
The same syndrome has been visible on cultural issues. Republican leaders in Congress, who talk only to the religious right, were shocked at the public backlash over their meddling in the Schiavo case. Did I mention that Rick Santorum is 14 points behind his likely challenger?
It all makes you wonder how these people ever ended up running the country in the first place. But remember that in 2000, Mr. Bush pretended to be a moderate, and that in the next two elections he used the Iraq war as a wedge to divide and perplex the Democrats.
In that context, it's worth noting two more poll results: in one taken before the recent resurgence of violence in Iraq, and the administration's announcement that it needs yet another $80 billion, 53 percent of Americans said that the Iraq war wasn't worth it. And 50 percent say that "the administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
Sunday, April 24, 2005
A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time
The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith." In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.
The "Justice Sunday" mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real "Justice Sunday" agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the "Tonight" show last week: " 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay." The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the "Justice Sunday" flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.
Anyone who doesn't get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of "people of faith." But "people of faith," as used by the event's organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it's a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight's presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to "sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers," according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. The only major religious leader involved with "Justice Sunday," R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a "false and unbiblical office" but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that "any belief system" leading "away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil."
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Blair blow as secret war doubts revealed
The Iraq war was thrust dramatically into the election spotlight last night after long-sought government legal advice, cautioning that the invasion could be illegal, was leaked.
The document appears to confirm for the first time that the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, had serious reservations about the legality of the conflict, only to change his mind as British and US troops massed on the border of Iraq ready to invade.
The government has steadfastly refused all calls to publish the document, and its sudden disclosure is bound to have an explosive effect on the election campaign, reawakening the prickly issue of voters' trust in Tony Blair, to the dismay of Labour MPs struggling to overcome anger over the war.
The 13 pages of legal advice that Goldsmith drew up on 7 March, according to a report in today's Mail on Sunday, warned that Blair could be in breach of international law for six reasons ranging from the lack of a second United Nations resolution to UN inspector Hans Blix's continuing search for weapons.
Ten days later, he apparently changed his mind, delivering a summary to Blair declaring the war was legal - the cue for the invasion.
... According to the report, the 7 March document cites, among potential risks, a strong argument that it was for the UN, not Blair, to decide whether Iraq had defied orders to disarm. While, in theory, the Prime Minister was entitled to take this decision, a court could rule otherwise.
It also questioned whether Britain could rely on UN resolution 1441 - warning of 'serious consequences' if Sad dam Hussein flouted the UN ruling - as grounds for invasion, and said it would be safer to proceed with a second UN resolution, which Blair could not obtain.
According to the newspaper report, the advice also warned it could be difficult to revive UN resolution 678, passed in 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait, as justification for the war. Goldsmith highlighted a report by Blix that Iraq was being more compliant.
None of these caveats appeared in the statement Goldsmith published in the House of Lords, on 17 March after giving a summary of his advice to the Cabinet.
The full legal document, apparently disclosed to the newspaper, is understood not to have been seen by the Cabinet.
DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card
The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.
DeLay's expenses during the same trip for food, phone calls and other items at a golf course hotel in Scotland were billed to a different credit card also used on the trip by a second registered Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham, according to receipts documenting that portion of the trip.
House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists. DeLay, who is now House majority leader, has said that his expenses on this trip were paid by a nonprofit organization and that the financial arrangements for it were proper. He has also said he had no way of knowing that any lobbyist might have financially supported the trip, either directly or through reimbursements to the nonprofit organization.
The documents obtained by The Washington Post, including receipts for his hotel stays in Scotland and London and billings for his golfing during the trip at the famed St. Andrews course in Scotland, substantiate for the first time that some of DeLay's expenses on the trip were billed to charge cards used by the two lobbyists. The invoice for DeLay's plane fare lists the name of what was then Abramoff's lobbying firm, Preston Gates & Ellis.
Multiple sources, including DeLay's then-chief of staff Susan Hirschmann, have confirmed that DeLay's congressional office was in direct contact with Preston Gates about the trip itinerary before DeLay's departure, to work out details of his travel. These contacts raise questions about DeLay's statement that he had no way of knowing about the financial and logistical support provided by Abramoff and his firm.
Friday, April 22, 2005
GOP Volunteer Probed on Role at President's Speech
The U.S. Secret Service is investigating whether a Republican volunteer committed the crime of impersonating a federal agent while forcibly removing three people from one of President Bush's public Social Security events, according to people familiar with the probe.
The Secret Service this week sent agents to Denver to probe allegations by three area Democrats that they were ousted from Bush's March 21 event. The three did not stage any protest at the rally and were later told by the Secret Service they were removed because their vehicle displayed an anti-Bush bumper sticker.
... This is not the first time the White House has faced scrutiny for ousting critics from Bush appearances or trying to stack audiences with friendly Republicans.
In Fargo, N.D., earlier this year, a local newspaper reported more than 40 residents were put on a list of people who should not be let in the door; the White House blamed the incident on an overzealous volunteer.
Several people reported similar treatment at other Social Security rallies, as well as during the 2004 presidential campaign, when the Bush team reportedly required some people to sign forms endorsing Bush to get into the events, and removed dissenters.
The Justice Department recently moved to dismiss a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of two West Virginia residents, who were arrested last year after refusing to remove anti-Bush shirts at a Bush campaign event at the state capitol. The lawsuit was filed against a White House advance staffer and Secret Service Director W. Ralph Basham. The ACLU is investigating other incidents to determine whether it can show a pattern of unlawfully silencing critics. "The incidents occurred in so many locations, it's hard to believe individuals in each local area are coincidentally making the same decision," said Christopher Hansen of the ACLU Foundation in New York.
Senate GOP Sets Up Filibuster Showdown
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has threatened to change Senate rules to ban filibusters for judicial nominations, clearing the way for them to be confirmed by a simple majority vote. But Democrats have threatened to bring the Senate to a virtual halt if Frist invokes what has been called the "nuclear option" on such nominations.
Republicans carefully chose their nominees for a Senate confrontation that could occur sometime in the next month, assuming that they can put Democrats, who pride themselves on appealing to female and black voters, on the defensive if they attempt again to deny two women, one of them an African American, an up-or-down vote.
But Democrats long have argued that race and sex aside, Owen and Brown are conservative ideologues whose views and writings make them unfit to serve in such sensitive, lifetime positions. Brown has said active governments lead to "a debased, debauched culture." Owen signed an opinion on abortion that drew a sharp rebuke from the man who now is Bush's attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales.
"We're in the ramp-up to a great constitutional crisis," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (news, bio, voting record) (D-N.Y.) said.
Lawmakers said yesterday's committee vote removed any doubts that Senate GOP leaders are closing in on their threat to change the chamber's rules and ban filibusters of judicial nominees.
Republicans said voters will punish Democrats if they bog down the Senate and kill energy bills, spending measures and other potentially popular items. But Democrats said Republicans, especially Bush, are to blame for renominating the two women and other appellate court nominees who were blocked by filibusters in his first term.
"President Bush is responsible for the ill will that has plagued this body for the past few years and the potentially disastrous upending of Senate precedents that we may soon see," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.).
Owen, a Texas Supreme Court justice, and Brown, a California Supreme Court justice, have solid conservative records and histories of making colorful remarks, which liberal groups have attacked for years. Democrats said their records, and nothing else, make them unsuitable for federal appellate court seats. "No one can seriously believe that objections to Justice Brown's nomination are motivated by racial or gender prejudice," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Kennedy and others recited the most controversial of Brown's and Owen's statements and rulings. For instance, Brown said in an April 2000 speech, "where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. . . . The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining, and virtue contemptible."
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Aid Worker Uncovered America's Secret Tally of Iraqi Civilian Deaths
A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces.
Tommy Franks, the former head of US Central Command, famously said the US army "don't do body counts", despite a requirement to do so by the Geneva Conventions.
But in an essay Ms Ruzicka wrote a week before her death on Saturday and published yesterday, the 28-year-old revealed that a Brigadier General told her it was "standard operating procedure" for US troops to file a report when they shoot a non-combatant.
She obtained figures for the number of civilians killed in Baghdad between 28 February and 5 April, and discovered that 29 had been killed in firefights involving US forces and insurgents. This was four times the number of Iraqi police killed.
"These statistics demonstrate that the US military can and does track civilian casualties," she wrote. "Troops on the ground keep these records because they recognise they have a responsibility to review each action taken and that it is in their interest to minimise mistakes, especially since winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis is a key component of their strategy."
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Justice Scalia ... You Know, You're an Activist Judge, Too
Conservative politicians insist that courts should defer to the democratically elected branches, but conservative judges do not seem to be listening. The Supreme Court's conservative majority regularly overturns laws passed by Congress, like the Violence Against Women Act and the Gun-Free School Zones Act. The court has even established a bizarre series of hoops Congress must jump through to pass a law protecting Americans' 14th Amendment equal-protection rights. Congress must prove in many cases that the law it passed is "congruent" and "proportional" to the harm being addressed. Even John Noonan Jr., an appeals court judge appointed by President Reagan, has said these new rules - which Justice Scalia eagerly embraces - reduce Congress to the level of an "administrative agency."
Justice Scalia likes to boast that he follows his strict-constructionist philosophy wherever it leads, even if it leads to results he disagrees with. But it is uncanny how often it leads him just where he already wanted to go. In his view, the 14th Amendment prohibits Michigan from using affirmative action in college admissions, but lets Texas make gay sex a crime. (The Supreme Court has held just the opposite.) He is dismissive when inmates invoke the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison conditions. But he is supportive when wealthy people try to expand the "takings clause" to block the government from regulating their property.
The inconsistency of the conservative war on judges was apparent in the Terri Schiavo ordeal. Mr. DeLay, an outspoken critic of activist courts, does not want to investigate the federal trial judge and the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit for judicial activism, but for the opposite: for refusing to overturn the Florida state courts' legal decisions, and Michael Schiavo's decisions about his wife's medical care.
The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court's conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting - it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Justice Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world." That, of course, isn't a constitutional argument - it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.
When it comes to judicial activism, conservative judges are no better than liberal ones - and, it must be said, no worse. If conservatives are going to continue their war on the judiciary, though, they should be honest. They do not want to get rid of judicial activists, a standard that would bring down even Justice Scalia. They want to rid the courts of judges who disagree with them.
A Radical in the White House
"The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Friday, April 15, 2005
You're Getting Screwed
"Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super-rich -- the top one-one hundredth of one percent of Americans.
"People making $60,000 paid a larger share of their 2001 income in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes than a family making $25 million, the latest Internal Revenue Service data show. And in income taxes alone, people making $400,000 paid a larger share of their incomes than the 7,000 households who made $10 million or more."
The rest of us are subsidizing not only the super-rich, but also corporations. Fifty years ago, corporations paid 60 percent of all federal taxes. But by 2003, that was down to 16 percent. So individual taxpayers have to make up the difference, as corporate profits soar and wages fall.
As more and more rich people cheat on their taxes, the IRS is increasingly unable to go after them because it is so poorly funded.
For all this, we can thank the Republican Party.
White House Curbs Probe of Commentator's Hiring
Education Department investigators looking into the administration's controversial hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams were denied the opportunity to interview some White House personnel because of a White House claim that such interviews could breach long-standing legal traditions.
... Williams, a television and newspaper commentator, received $240,000 in federal funds last year to promote the president's No Child Left Behind initiative. Williams did not disclose the payments made to him through a public relations firm hired by the Education Department, even as he appeared on television promoting the president's work.
Bolton's Pressure on C.I.A. Analyst Angered Colleagues
An attempt in 2002 by John R. Bolton to remove the national intelligence officer for Latin America from his post prompted John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, to intervene against the request, according to current and former intelligence officials.
Mr. McLaughlin's previously undisclosed role is being reviewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as it considers the nomination of Mr. Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations. In testimony last week, Mr. Bolton acknowledged that he had sought to have the intelligence officer, Fulton T. Armstrong, reassigned.
The incident is one of at least three being reviewed by the committee in which Mr. Bolton sought the removal of subordinates or intelligence officials during his time as an under secretary of state. Senate Democrats who oppose Mr. Bolton's nomination intend to highlight the infighting as an indication that Mr. Bolton's actions toward subordinates were inappropriate enough to require action by other senior officials.
... The Democrats on the committee are also reviewing Mr. Bolton's tenure at the Justice Department in 1988, when he led the civil division and was involved in a bitter dispute with a senior attorney over the length of her maternity leave.
The Medical Money Pit
... the United States scores high on high-tech services - we have lots of M.R.I.'s - but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors' visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There's also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries.
The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad - but they don't actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It's the Prices, Stupid."
Why is the price of U.S. health care so high? One answer is doctors' salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts. Another answer is that America's health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry.
Above all, a large part of America's health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
A Tax Increase That Bush Didn't Mention
CYNICS have long predicted that the Bush administration, plagued by budget deficits, will eventually start raising taxes. But now it is becoming clear how it would do so: the alternative minimum tax.
Baffling in its complexity and often bizarre in its impact, the alternative minimum tax is a giant undeclared tax increase that will ensnare tens of millions of moderate-income families in the next several years.
It was created in 1969 to prevent the very rich from using tax deductions to avoid paying a fair share of taxes. But when the deadline for filing income tax returns arrives on Friday, the alternative minimum tax will require 2.9 million families to pay an average of about $6,000 more than what they would owe under traditional calculations
That is just the start. If current law remains unchanged, the alternative minimum tax is expected to wring an extra $33.9 billion from 18 million households in 2006. In 2010, it will rake in an additional $100 billion, and by 2015 an extra $200 billion.
Make no mistake: no one says they want that to happen. But it is one thing to rein in or eliminate the tax itself, and an entirely different matter to give up the money that it would generate.
President Bush has promised to fix the alternative minimum tax as part a fundamental overhaul of the tax code, and he has ordered a bipartisan advisory panel to come up with recommendations by the end of July.
But in giving the panel its marching orders, White House officials made it clear that they are counting on the extra money regardless of what happens to the alternative tax.
Rift Emerges in GOP After Schiavo Case
p conservative leaders gathered here a week after Terri Schiavo's death to plot a course of action against the nation's courts, but much of their anger was directed at leading Republicans, exposing an emerging crack between the party's leadership and core supporters on the right.
Conservative leaders criticized President Bush for failing to speak out strongly against removing the feeding tube from Schiavo, the 41-year-old incapacitated woman who died March 31. They blamed the president's brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, for failing to employ State Police powers to take control of Schiavo. They condemned comments by Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and Vice President Dick Cheney expressing support for the nation's judges.
... President Bush may have further complicated his relations with conservative activists yesterday, when he responded to a reporter's question about whether the Schiavo case showed that judges were out of control and should be held responsible. ''I believe in an independent judiciary. I believe in proper checks and balances," the president said in an interview with reporters on Air Force One as he returned from Pope John Paul II's funeral in Rome. His comments drew praise from Democrats such as Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Inquiries into Top Lobbyist Reveal Corruption in GOP
Abramoff, known to envious competitors as "Casino Jack" because of his multimillion-dollar lobbying fees from the gambling operations of American Indians, wrote to a Texas tribe in June 2002 to say that a member of Congress had "asked if we could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff" that summer. "The trip will be quite expensive," Mr. Abramoff said in the e-mail message, estimating that the bills "would be around $100K or more." He added that in 2000, "We did this for another member - you know who."
Mr. Abramoff did not explain why the tribe should pay for the lavish trip, nor did he identify the congressmen by name. But a tribe spokesman has since testified to Congress that the 2002 trip was organized for Representative Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican and chairman of the House Administration Committee, and that "you know who" was a much more powerful Republican, Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader and old friend of Mr. Abramoff's. Both lawmakers have said they believed that the trips complied with House travel rules.
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Transcripts show confusion, ire at Guantanamo tribunals
the stories of about 60 detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base have spilled out in court papers.
A U.S. college-educated detainee asks plaintively in one: "Is it possible to see the evidence in order to refute it?"
In another transcript, the unidentified president of a U.S. military tribunal bursts out: "I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words 'international law' again. We are not concerned with international law."
Thursday, April 07, 2005
In the Name of Politics By JOHN C. DANFORTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opinion/30danforth.html?ex=1113019200&en=736bc4f97aa2fd5a&ei=5070
BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.
Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.
High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.
It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
(MAUREEN DOWD commented: John Danforth, the former Republican senator and U.N. ambassador, wrote an Op-Ed piece in The Times last week saying that, on issues from stem cell research to Terri Schiavo, his party "has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement."
When the Rev. Danforth, an Episcopal minister who prayed with Clarence Thomas when he was under attack by Anita Hill, says the party has gone too far, it's way over the edge.)
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
The Judges Made Them Do It
It was appalling when the House majority leader threatened political retribution against judges who did not toe his extremist political line. But when a second important Republican stands up and excuses murderous violence against judges as an understandable reaction to their decisions, then it is time to get really scared.
It happened on Monday, in a moment that was horrifying even by the rock-bottom standards of the campaign that Republican zealots are conducting against the nation's judiciary. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, rose in the chamber and dared to argue that recent courthouse violence might be explained by distress about judges who "are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public." The frustration "builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in" violence, said Mr. Cornyn, a former member of the Texas Supreme Court who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which supposedly protects the Constitution and its guarantee of an independent judiciary.
Listeners could only cringe at the events behind Mr. Cornyn's fulminating: an Atlanta judge was murdered in his courtroom by a career criminal who wanted only to shoot his way out of a trial, and a Chicago judge's mother and husband were executed by a deranged man who was furious that she had dismissed a wild lawsuit. It was sickening that an elected official would publicly offer these sociopaths as examples of any democratic value, let alone as holders of legitimate concerns about the judiciary.
Are Honors for Physicians the New Political Diploma Mill?
The good news reached the Jamestown, N.Y., office of Dr. Rudolph Mueller in a fax from a congressman in Washington. Mueller had been named 2004 Physician of the Year.
"My secretary came running in and said, 'Dr. Rudy, look at what you've won, you're Physician of the Year,' " said Mueller, an internist.
But to receive the award in person at a special two-day workshop in Washington last month, Mueller found out that he would have to make a $1,250 contribution to the National Republican Congressional Committee. It was a disturbing discovery, he said.
"To actually buy your award and it's not from your peers or from your patients or from the community that you serve, it's really deceptive," said Mueller, author of "As Sick As It Gets: The Shocking Reality of America's Healthcare, A Diagnosis and Treatment Plan." "It's not being honest, it's just not right."
To see what the award process was all about, Mueller sent in his $1,250 contribution and ABC News paid for his travel to Washington for the scheduled events March 14-15, which included a tax-reform workshop as well as appearances by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and President Bush.
Mueller soon found he was not the only winner. There were hundreds of Physicians of the Year present, many of whom found the criteria for being selected equally as opaque.
White House Has Tightly Restricted Oversight of C.I.A. Detentions
WASHINGTON, April 5 - The White House is maintaining extraordinary restrictions on information about the detention of high-level terror suspects, permitting only a small number of members of Congress to be briefed on how and where the prisoners are being held and interrogated, senior government officials say.
Some Democratic members of Congress say the restrictions are impeding effective oversight of the secret program, which is run by the Central Intelligence Agency and is believed to involve the detention of about three dozen senior Qaeda leaders at secret sites around the world.
By law, the White House is required to notify the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of all intelligence-gathering activities. But the White House has taken the stance that the secret detention program is too sensitive to be described to any members other than the top Republican and Democrat on each panel.
The issue is expected to be discussed at a hearing scheduled for Thursday, at which Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence, is to testify in closed session before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The detention program remains so highly classified that the members of Congress would discuss the restrictions that surround it only in the most general of terms.
"These restricted briefings should be expanded," said Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Bush is handing U.S. firms ‘a blank check for corporate anarchy’
The poster child for corruption in the occupation of Iraq is Custer Battles, which overcharged the CPA by millions of dollars, according to military authorities. The administration has refused to join efforts to prosecute the company. Custer Battles denies the charges.
Why the party that used to harp on government “waste, fraud and abuse” is letting this stinking mess of corruption develop may be explained by an executive order Bush issued May 22, 2003.
International Oil Daily reported a few months later: “Lawyers with watchdog and advocacy groups say the president’s ruling on indemnity goes well beyond the legal protection for Iraqi oil agreed on at the U.N. Other lawyers and government officials argue that the legal protection is limited to Iraqi oil and that the order was not trying to sneak in a legal shield for corporate America in its dealings with Iraq.
“In the EO, Bush is handing U.S. firms ‘a blank check for corporate anarchy’ in an ‘outlandish cancellation of the rule of law,’ said legal director Tom Devine with the Government Accountability Project. “
According to Newsweek, the administration argues privately that the CPA was a multinational institution, not an arm of the U.S. government, so the government was not technically defrauded.
“If urgent steps are not taken, Iraq . . . will become the biggest corruption scandal in history, “ said Transparency International, an anti-corruption group.
The EO itself reads: “I hereby order . . . any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void, with respect to the following: a) the Development Fund for Iraq and b) all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products. “ That would pretty much cover Halliburton.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Congress' Implicit Healthcare Rationing As an emergency physician and former governor, I am struck by the towering contradictions - and indeed the hypocrisy - in the controversy over the tragic plight of Terri Schiavo. On the same day that the US House of Representatives voted to involve the federal courts in her case, it also approved a 10-year $92-billion cut in Medicaid funding - $30 billion deeper than the cut recommended by President Bush.
The relationship between these two decisions - virtually unreported by most media - goes to the very heart of why we're unable to resolve the growing crisis in our healthcare system. While involving the federal courts in an attempt to save the life of one highly visible individual, Congress made a fiscal decision that will deny thousands of other Americans timely access to healthcare, some of whom may die as a result.
To understand this point is to understand the insidious form of implicit rationing practiced by legislative bodies throughout the nation - starting with the Congress. When the Congress cuts Medicaid funding, it is a direct cost shift to the states that administer the program. However, unlike Congress - which has run up a $7 trillion national debt over the past four years - states are required to operate within a balanced budget. So they respond to cuts in Medicaid by dropping people and/or services from coverage.
The Pope's 'Seismic Shift'
For close to 1,500 years, the Catholic Church taught that the state had a right to punish criminals "by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty."
For centuries, that line in the Catechism of the Catholic Church was used by Catholic politicians--and others who sought a moral justification for their actions--to place a veneer of legitimacy on even the most cavalier executions of the young, the mentally handicapped and the innocent. Even as Pope John Paul II moved the church closer and closer to explicit opposition to the death penalty during his long tenure, the loophole in the Catechism remained.
Then, in 1997, Sister Helen Prejean, the American nun and death penalty abolitionist who authored the book Dead Man Walking, asked Pope John Paul II to close the loophole. Late that year, the Pope removed the reference to the death penalty from the Catechism and, when he visited the United States two years later, he denounced the death penalty as "cruel and unnecessary." Referencing moves by countries around the world to ban capital punishment, the Pope declared in St. Louis that, "A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil."
Fury at 'Shoot for Fun' Memo One of the biggest private security firms in Iraq has created outrage after a memo to staff claimed it is 'fun' to shoot people.
Emails seen by The Observer reveal that employees of Blackwater Security were recently sent a message stating that 'actually it is "fun" to shoot some people.'
Dated 7 March and bearing the name of Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, the electronic newsletter adds that terrorists 'need to get creamed, and it's fun, meaning satisfying, to do the shooting of such folk.'
Human rights groups said yesterday that the comments raised fresh questions over the role of civilian contractors operating in Iraq and other world flashpoints.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Harsh Tactics Were Allowed, General Told Jailers in Iraq
The top United States commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation tactics that were harsher than accepted Army practice, including using guard dogs to exploit "Arab fear of dogs," a memo made public on Tuesday showed.
The memo, dated Sept. 14, 2003, and signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the senior commander in Iraq, was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained it from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.
The Abu Ghraib scandal, in which United States forces physically abused and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners at a jail on the outskirts of Baghdad, occurred under General Sanchez's command.
20 U.S. Soldiers Hurt in Abu Ghraib Attack
BAGHDAD, Iraq - (AP) Dozens of insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades and detonated two car bombs Saturday while attacking the Abu Ghraib prison in western Baghdad, wounding 20 American service members and 12 prisoners, the U.S. military said.
The attack, carried out by 40-60 militants, began as darkness fell on the city, 1st Lt. Adam Rondeau said. Soldiers and Marines stationed at the detention facility responded, and the resulting clash lasted about 40 minutes, Rondeau said.
"This was obviously a very well-organized attack and a very big attack," he said.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the insurgents carrying out the attack suffered casualties or were arrested.
Friday, April 01, 2005
U.S. Again Sides with Dictatorship over Democracy
Central Asia provides a case study in the gaping chasm between our high-flying freedom-and-democracy rhetoric and a grim reality in which we cut sleazy deals with thuggish tyrants. We abandoned the democratic role model Akayev created in Kyrgyzstan because it had no direct role in America's strategy of "total energy dominance." We cozied up to the murderous dictators of oil- and gas-rich Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan even though we knew their citizens despised them for funneling their nations' wealth into Swiss bank accounts while most people starved.
Now Central Asia's only democracy is history. The dictatorships are cracking down on Muslims guilty of nothing more than wearing a beard and a skullcap. They're turning moderates into radicals. That sound you hear is Osama laughing. Again.
Screened Audiences, Fake News Promote Bush Agenda---Bush, Government Manipulate Media
by Helen Thomas
... As he travels around the nation to make his pitch that Social Security is in a crisis, the president is limiting his congregation to screened, sanitized audiences. Why does he sermonize on the subject only to carefully selected audiences?
These are people who are vetted to make sure they agree with the president's views. If they pass that test, the local Republican Party or the groups sponsoring the event then issue tickets to the so-called "town meetings" or "conversations with the president."
Asked why the president speaks only to his supporters, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush's intention is to "educate" the people. He probably meant "indoctrinate."
Is this the president of all the people -- or just some of the people who agree with him?
It's bizarre. He's preaching to the choir, hardly the way to "educate" the public.
Controlling his audience was a prime goal of Bush's 2004 presidential campaign, when anti-war protesters were barred from his public appearances. People who openly disagreed with him were hustled out of the hall. We're now seeing the same audience control when Bush speaks about Social Security. The Secret Service and White House aides apparently spend a lot of time trying to handpick those permitted to hear him.
Bush seems satisfied that he has made Social Security a worry to people. That's the goal of his sky-is-falling campaign. But the president is not ready to handle genuine dialogue on the subject or deal with those opposed to his plan to partially privatize the government pension program.
... The New York Times on March 13 published an in-depth report on how the administration is cranking up its public relations campaign to manipulate broadcast news by distributing pre-packaged videos prepared by several federal agencies, including the Pentagon.
... The Government Accountability Office -- a congressional investigative unit -- has ruled that such government videos represent "covert propaganda." The GAO declared that agencies may not produce pre-packaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience" that they were made by the government.
But the White House rejected that opinion and handed reporters a memorandum from the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget directing the federal agencies to ignore the GAO verdict.
The memo contended that the GAO did not distinguish between propaganda and "purely informational" news reports and claimed there was no requirement for a federal agency to label its disguised broadcasts.
This is consistent with the administration's other outrageous exercise in propaganda, which took the form of paying a few columnists and broadcasters, such as Armstrong Williams, to promote administration programs.
The Gates of Hell Are Open in Iraq
The US-British occupation of Iraq is poisoning all political processes in my country and across the Middle East. The elections held under the control of the occupying forces in January were neither free nor fair. Instead of being a step towards solving Iraq's problems, they have been used to prolong foreign rule over the Iraqi people.
Only when the occupiers withdraw from the country can Iraq take the first secure steps towards peace and stability. Once a strict timetable for withdrawal is set, Iraq's political forces could freely agree and set in motion a process of genuinely free and fair democratic elections, a permanent constitution, and a program that meets the demands of all the Iraqi people.
The occupying powers are now following a policy of divide and rule, encouraging sectarian and ethnic divisions and imposing them on all the institutions they have created.
Incidents such as the recent kidnapping of an Italian journalist, released only to be received by a hail of bullets from the US liberators, have fueled widespread suspicions in Iraq as to who is in fact responsible for many of the terrorist acts - kidnappings, assassinations, and indiscriminate bombing and killing -that are engulfing the whole of Iraq. These have coincided with a cover-up of significant military operations being conducted against the occupation forces across the country.
Not one of the terrorist crimes has been solved and not a single perpetrator put on trial. After each major terrorist crime, the arrest of perpetrators is proclaimed, using names and personalities spread by the US-controlled media. This media effort - which also seeks to bury the news of the destruction of entire towns, brutal night raids, kidnappings, curfews, and the detention and torture of thousands of prisoners - is overseen by the information department of the US forces, who earned the US defense secretary's special thanks during his visit to Iraq.
These crimes are a taste of the hell created by the US project in the Middle East. And now this hell is beginning to be visited on Lebanon, opening the prospect of endless wars of unimaginable consequences.
U.S. Soldiers Told to 'Beat the F**k Out of' Detainees
The Army report concluded that the broken jaw was caused either as a result of a blow by a U.S. soldier or a collapse due to ”complete muscle failure” from being excessively exercised.
Death of a detainee with no history of medical problems: Abu Malik Kenami died while in detention in Mosul, Iraq. On the day he died, Kenami had been ”punished with several ups and downs -- a correctional technique of having a detainee stand up and then sit-down rapidly, always keeping them in constant motion...and ha(d) his hands flex-cuffed behind his back.”
He was also hooded, with ”a sandbag placed over (his) head.” The file states that ”(t)he cause of Abu Malik Kenami's death will never be known because an autopsy was never performed on him.”
Soldiers were told to ”beat the f**k out of detainees”: Army documents include sworn statements that soldiers were told in August 2003 to ”take the detainee(s) out back and beat the f**k out of them.”
Perceptions of chain of command endorsement of retribution: A military intelligence team saw soldiers kicking blindfolded and ”zipcuffed” detainees several times in the sides while yelling profanities at them. The investigation concludes that at least three military personnel abused the detainees.
It adds that some of the soldiers ”may perceive that the chain-of-command is endorsing 'pay-back' by allowing the units most affected by suspected detainee actions to play the greatest role in bringing those suspects to justice.”
In a separate development, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which joined the ACLU in the FOIA case, said ”at least 26 prisoners who died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 were likely the victims of criminal homicide.”
CCR released a series of documents surrounding one unexplained death in Mosul, Iraq, obtained through a FOIA request with the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace. CCR said the documents derive from ”what appears to be a very brief investigation of the death of a prisoner” in December 2003 in an Army Brigade Holding Area in Mosul, Iraq.
We Can't Remain Silent
"At some point," said General Cullen, "I had to say: 'Wait a minute. We cannot go along with this.' "
The two retired officers have lent their support to an extraordinary lawsuit that seeks to hold Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ultimately accountable for policies that have given rise to torture and other forms of prisoner abuse. And last September they were among a group of eight retired admirals and generals who wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to create an independent 9/11-type commission to fully investigate the problem of prisoner abuse from the top to the bottom of the command structure.
... The letter to President Bush emphasized the wide scope of the problem, noting that there were "dozens of well-documented allegations of torture, abuse and otherwise questionable detention practices" involving prisoners in U.S. custody. It said:
"These reports have implicated both U.S. military and intelligence agencies, ranging from junior enlisted members to senior command officials, as well as civilian contractors. ... No fewer than a hundred criminal, military and administrative inquiries have been launched into apparently improper or unlawful U.S. practices related to detention and interrogation. Given the range of individuals and locations involved in these reports, it is simply no longer possible to view these allegations as a few instances of an isolated problem."
Republican Leader Warns Judges: You Will Answer for This
DeLay's threat to judges was greeted with shock in many quarters. Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy branded it "irresponsible and reprehensible. At a time when emotions are running high, Mr. DeLay needs to make clear that he is not advocating violence against anyone," he said.In Houston, his home district, DeLay said Congress "for many years has shirked its responsibility to hold the judiciary accountable. No longer.
"We will look at an arrogant, out of control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at the Congress and president when given jurisdiction to hear this case anew and look at all the facts ... The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today."
DeLay's comments are important on two fronts — an epic struggle over anticipated Supreme Court vacancies is expected to mark the second Bush term, with Democrats threatening to try to block overtly conservative nominees. But that will be played out in the Senate, not in DeLay's domain in the House of Representatives.
His remarks also ignored the fact that many of the judges who ignored Bush and the Republican-led Congress were Republican appointees.
DeLay is also fighting a litany of allegations of ethics violations and is the target of third-party TV ads alleging he used the Schiavo case to deflect attention from his own problems.
He had told a group of social conservatives just before the Palm Sunday recall of Congress that God had given Schiavo to America to highlight the need to fight for a "culture of life."
Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, said he believes DeLay was likely speaking from conviction while trying to rally a Christian-right base that could help him keep his key post....
Polls have consistently shown Americans believe Michael Schiavo was right to act on what he said was his wife's wish — not to be kept alive in a vegetative state — and a strong majority indicated Congress was wrong to intervene in a private matter.
