Ron Paul tells Cheney to STFU

CNN:
(CNN) – Dick Cheney is taking criticism from at least one member of his own party over the former vice president's recent and persistent criticisms of the Obama administration's handling of national security issues.
Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and upstart 2008 presidential candidate, told CNN's Larry King Monday night Cheney is in no place to criticize Obama's handling of the war on terrorism.
"I think he had his eight years, and he's caused a lot of trouble for our country and perpetuated a war in Iraq unnecessary and wrong-headed," said Paul. "I would say it would be best he not be so critical right now."
Paul was a constant critic of the Iraq war during his unsuccessful presidential run. While he is currently not seeking a higher office, his son, Rand, is seeking the Republican nomination for Senate in Kentucky.
Paul's comments come several days after Cheney released a tough-worded statement criticizing the president's response to the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day.
"He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won't be at war," Cheney said in the statement. "He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won't be at war."'
White House Communications Director Dan Pffeifer later responded the president "is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action."
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I knew I liked Ron Paul. Haven't I been saying this since January of 2009? Hmmm...Cheney needs to shut his mouth unless he's ready to offer real alternatives to Obama's strategies. So far, all he seems to do is naysay and tell Obama to go back to his and Bush's [failed] strategies. If you want to be a real leader, admit your administration screwed up and stop trying to tell Obama to continue to do what you did, what we voted against in November '08...maybe come up with something new for once.

Bailouts DID help...but at what cost?

Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General in Charge of oversight for the bailouts, essentially a government watchdog, is releasing a report today in which he gives a blunt assessment for the TARP bailouts started under Bush and expanded by Obama: The Bailouts saved our economy, but cost us more in the long term.

TIME:

[Barofsky] said the $700 billion bailout for the financial industry played a major role in rescuing the economy over the last year but also engendered anger and distrust among Americans because of secrecy and confusion about the way the program was handled...

"Despite the aspects of TARP that could reasonably be viewed as a substantial success," he wrote, "Treasury's actions in this regard have contributed to damage the credibility of the program and of the government itself, and the anger, cynicism and distrust created must be chalked up as one of the substantial, albeit unnecessary, costs of TARP."

Barofsky said public suspicion was fed by Treasury's decision not to require banks to report how they used their rescue money and its "less-than-accurate" statements describing the financial condition of nine large banks that benefited from large infusions of aid...

Overall, Barofsky said the cost of preventing a financial collapse fell into three categories:

•Taxpayers: The government has spent more than $454 billion through TARP programs. Forty-seven TARP recipients have paid back nearly $73 billion. That means more than $317 billion remains available. The program is set to end Dec. 31, but the administration could seek an extension until next October. Despite the repayments several of the program are not expected to yield returns to the taxpayer, including a $50 billion mortgage modification plan and some of the money injected into auto companies.

•The integrity of the industry: Many firms considered "too big to fail" last year, and thus in need of government assistance, are even bigger now. "Absent meaningful regulatory reform, TARP runs the risk of merely reanimating markets that had collapsed under the weight of reckless behavior," the report sates.

•The credibility of the government: Barofsky wrote that public antipathy for the bailout is fueled by "the lack of transparency in the program." Over the course of the year, Barofsky has called on the Treasury Department to seek more information from banks on how they use their taxpayer assistance.
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Basically, the bailouts worked in the short term. But because of government ineptitude and all the secrecy, distrust has been seeded instead of consumer confidence, which is what was really needed for the market to correct itself. A full disclosure and better oversight in the bailouts would've helped, but both Bush and Obama almost gave the money away without really looking at the causes of the collapse; in essence both Presidents merely put a bandaid on an infected shotgun wound, when what we really needed was to fix the root of the problem and cover the wound. We should've given the bailouts and broken up the "too big to fail" companies to make sure it never happened again.

Dept. of Justice tightening "State Secrets"

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department will continue Bush administration attempts to block certain lawsuits by claiming they threaten state secrets, but the agency announced Wednesday it will try to curb the use of such claims in the future.
Attorney General Eric Holder said he and a group of Justice Department lawyers will personally review such claims.
During the Bush administration, the so-called state secrets privilege was invoked to quash lawsuits filed by people claiming they had been tortured or illegally wiretapped.
The Bush administration argued in those cases -- and the Obama administration still argues in a few cases alive in the courts -- that the lawsuits must be dismissed because evidence in the case would harm national security.
In a statement, Holder said the new policy ''sets out clear procedures that will provide greater accountability and ensure the state secrets privilege is invoked only when necessary and in the narrowest way possible.''
The administration's move could quell efforts in Congress to pass a law curbing the use of state secrets claims.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, praised Wednesday's announcement, but added he remains ''especially concerned'' that the government should be required to show significant evidence to a judge when seeking to assert the privilege, and said he hoped the Obama administration would work with Congress to establish such a requirement.
Under the new approach spelled out by Holder, an agency trying to hide such information would have to convince the attorney general and a panel of Justice Department lawyers that its release would compromise national security.
In the past, such government claims of state secrecy required a lower standard of proof that the information was dangerous, as well as the approval of fewer officials.
The Justice Department press release said the government will also submit evidence to a judge to buttress its claims of state secrets, but Holder's actual legal memo to department lawyers makes no mention of sharing information with judges.
That has been a highly contentious issue in previous state secrets cases.
Asked why Holder's memo does not instruct government lawyers to share evidence with judges, Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said the new policy will be conveyed internally.
The Bush administration was criticized for invoking state secrets claims in lawsuits challenging post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism programs, and the incoming Obama administration had promised a thorough review of such claims.
Yet in conducting its review, the Obama administration has continued to assert the privilege in all the current cases.
In one lawsuit brought by a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, government lawyers changed their reasoning for invoking the state secrets privilege, but are still asserting it.
The judge in that case ridiculed the effort as two-faced.
''The government's new refrain is heads you lose, tails we win,'' U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth wrote in a recent decision, which was overturned on appeal.

Source

Two things I put emphasis on. First: Obama is a hypocrite. As Tao says, Obama really isn't much different from Bush on most major issues. Iraq withdrawal timetable? Bush's. The Afghanistan war? Bush's. The Bailouts? A continuation of Bush's. Guantanamo Bay? Kept it open, just like Bush did. States Secrets? Just like Bush.

Really, Obama is the democrat version of G.W.B.

Second: In our Federal Government, we have always had checks and balances. States Secrets should be no different. Otherwise, the Executive Branch can (and did) just use it to cover their backsides. We need a judge to review the evidence and decide whether or not it is actually sensitive. If not, then proceed with the case. If it is sensitive, throw the case out. 'Nuff said.

Waterboarding saved NO lives.

I have previously blogged about the morality and legality of waterboarding here, here, here, here, here, and here. There are other articles out there that deal with this, such as the illegality of threats of imminent death. But this post will be about the other argument I've heard: "It worked." Not true.

Even though Cheney has claimed that documents would vindicate his claim that his "enhanced interrogation techniques" [torture] saved "hundreds of thousands of lives," (a claim he later backtracked on, implicity denying that they saved a single life in reality) one of the FBI's best interrogaters has shown that, in reality, waterboarding doesn't work.

Here are some of the highlights of the article:

Former FBI Interrogator Ali Soufan testified on the use of torture before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee and stated that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are "slow, ineffective, unreliable, and harmful to our efforts." Soufan was able to obtain valuable intel using techniques labeled the "informed interrogation approach", which are consistent with the Army Field Manual. His testimony is fascinating.

Soufin was the agent who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah, the man now famous for being waterboarded 83 times. Zubaydah had been badly wounded in the struggle to capture him and was almost immediately taken to a hospital. It was there that Soufin began his interrogation, and gained "important, actionable intelligence" within the first hour regarding the role Khalid Sheikh Mohammed played in the 9-11 attacks. Committee Chair Sheldon called this "one of the more significant pieces of intelligence information we've ever obtained in the war on terror."

Soon the CIA-CTC was brought in, and a private contractor instructed them to subject Zubaydah to harsh interrogation techniques. Michael Isikoff wrote that: "Agency operatives were aiming to crack him with rough and unorthodox interrogation tactics—including stripping him nude, turning down the temperature and bombarding him with loud music." Soufan told the committee that Zubaydah "shut down." Later, Soufan interrogated the man again, using Army sanctioned methods, and Zubaydah disclosed information about the alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. According to Soufan, the contractor soon reasserted control, ordering the use of "enhanced" techniques and Zubaydah shut down again. Worried, Soufan objected to his FBI superiors, and was soon ordered home by Director Mueller, who also decreed that FBI personnel should no longer participate in CIA interrogations.

Soufan's account of this interrogation contradicts the May 2005 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel which implied that this valuable information was elicited from Zubaydah as a result of the harsh interrogation techniques used. Soufan's account is deeply damaging to arguments about torture's effectiveness Dick Cheney and other Bush-era officials have been making of late.

Soufan describes his methods as follows:
The approach is based on leveraging our knowledge of a detainee's mindset, vulnerabilities, and culture together with using intelligence already known about him. The interrogator uses a combination of interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional strategies to exact the information needed. If done correctly, this approach works quickly and effectively because it outsmarts the detainee using a method that he is not trained nor able to resist.

He then critiqued the "enhanced techniques":
The Army Field Manual is not about being soft; it's about outwitting, outsmarting, and manipulating the detainee. The approach is in sharp contrast of the enhanced interrogation method that instead tries to subjugate the detainee into submission through humiliation and cruelty. The idea behind it is to force the detainee to see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain. It's merely an exercise in trying to force compliance rather than elicit cooperation. A major problem with it is it is ineffective. Al Qaeda are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, their training prepares them for much worse. The torture that they would receive if caught by dictatorships, for example. In a democracy, however, there is a glass ceiling the interrogator cannot breach. And eventually, the detainee will call the interrogator's bluff..... The technique is also unreliable. We don't know whether the detainee is being truthful or just speaking to mitigate his discomfort. The technique is also slow. Waiting 180 hours as part of a sleep deprivation stage is time we cannot afford to waste in a ticking-bomb scenario.
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There is more in the article linked above. It's a good read. We could've gotten the information in many different ways. But no, we wanted to feel better and [torture] our detainees, getting back at them for 9/11. But we did not have to, and it was an exercise in futility.

Here is something else that has bothered me in this whole debate: the questioning of our patriotism if we have a legitimate problems with torture, even of our enemies. I personally have had my Republican credentials questioned because I didn't, and never will, support torturing our enemies.

I think this summed it up quite well for me:

Conservative pundits casually liken waterboarding to prep-school initiation, and claim that anyone who opposes prisoner abuse must simply hate America. The president himself asks us to move on. And the great number of ordinary Americans who have, in fact, expressed outrage are dismissed as members of the bloodthirsty "hard left."

Congressional report on Domestic [warrantless] wiretapping

The Congressional investigation's report released yesterday had some interesting things to say about the Bush Administration's domestic surveillance program.

To summarize:

1. The Congressional Probe doesn't question, nor does it criticize, the objectives and intentions of the program launched in 2001, since its aim was to stop terrorism.
2. The investigators did, however, conclude that the legal basis for doing the program was "factually flawed" and that relying on one attorney, the now infamous John Yoo, to provide the legal framework was extremely inappropriate for all parties involved.
The White House should not have relied upon one attorney in the Department of Justice. John Yoo was also well out of line to provide it, because he circumvented his bosses, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"The lack of oversight and review of Yoo's work ... contributed to a legal analysis of the [program] that at a minimum was factually flawed," it says.

Since then, the Justice Department has repudiated all of John Yoo's legal opinions on this and others: the John Yoo Memos, in which he gave [flawed] legal rationale for the US Executive Branch to overturn much of the Bill of Rights, citizen or not, in search of terrorism.

The report notes that several members of Congress -- including then-House Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Nancy Pelosi -- were briefed on the program on October 25, 2001, and a total of 17 times before the program became public in 2005.
The document repeats the public assertion by former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden that no member of Congress had urged that the program be stopped.

Source

John Yoo should be disbarred. He circumvented Dept. of Justice protocols, and his legal memos were all, at best, "extremely flawed." Also, I have to ask: Why did the White House depend solely on the opinion of one immigrant lawyer on issues so important as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

Barack Dubya Obama: Part II

Thanks to the Impolitic for first posting about this:

Obama Blocks Access to White House visitor log:

So much for "more transparency"!

So much for "[the white house] is the people's house," not the President's.

Ugh.

As BluePitBull is fond of saying, if the voters don't want something that the politician does, "too bad."

Voters overwhemingly voted Obama in office based on his promises of "more transparency" and "change we can believe in"...so far, we're getting more of the same. I posted on another broken promise back in April. You can read it here.

Here we go:

Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

From the Impolitic again:

This isn't change we can believe in. Hell, it's not even a change and all these little incidents are adding up. I'm beginning to wonder if Obama wants to be a one term president after all.

George W. Bush, Nixon, whatever.

Thanks to Truthdig for this one.

It seems we are living out history repeated. In my last post, I discussed the parallels between President FDR violating the US Constitution after Pearl Harbor, finding many, many parallels to President George W. Bush's Constitutional Violations.

Here's another parallel: Richard Nixon's Watergate and George W. Bush's Waterboarding.

From the Truthdig article (link above): "While the Watergate scandal was unfolding, widespread evidence was mounting of illegal government activity, including domestic spying and the infiltration and disruption of legal political groups, mostly anti-war groups, in a broad-based, secret government crackdown on dissent. In response, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities was formed. It came to be known as the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church. The Church Committee documented and exposed extraordinary activities on the CIA and FBI, such as CIA efforts to assassinate foreign leaders, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence) program, which extensively spied on prominent leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

It is not only the practices that are similar, but the people. Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., general counsel to the Church Committee, noted two people who were active in the Ford White House and attempted to block the committee’s work: “Rumsfeld and then [Dick] Cheney were people who felt that nothing should be known about these secret operations, and there should be as much disruption as possible.”

From wikipedia's watergate entry:

When Nixon's tapes regarding these activities were subpoenaed, Nixon refused, citing the principle of executive privilege, and ordered Cox, via Attorney General Richardson, to drop his subpoena. When Cox wouldn't, he had him fired.

While Nixon continued to refuse to turn over actual tapes, he did agree to release edited transcripts of a large number of them; Nixon cited the fact that any audio pertinent to national security information could be redacted from the released tapes.

The tapes largely confirmed Dean's account and caused further embarrassment when a crucial, 18½ minute portion of one tape, which had never been out of White House custody, was found to have been erased. The White House blamed this on Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who said she had accidentally erased the tape by pushing the wrong foot pedal on her tape player while answering the phone. However, as photos splashed all over the press showed, it was unlikely for Woods to answer the phone and keep her foot on the pedal. Later forensic analysis determined that the gap had been erased in several segments — at least five, and perhaps as many as nine[19]—refuting the "accidental erasure" explanation.

During the investigation of the abuses at Guantanamo and the "enhanced interrogation"(Truthdig):

Amrit Singh, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Pentagon’s photos “provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib. Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse.” The ACLU also won a ruling to obtain documents relating to the CIA’s destruction of 92 videotapes of harsh interrogations. The tapes are gone, supposedly, but notes about the content of the tapes remain, and a federal judge has ordered their release.

Seems like Justice needs to be dealt, once again, to a President from the Republican Party.

Also, anyone saying that releasing these memos and photos "harms" the nation: when watergate came out, did the US get "harmed" from the truth coming out?

George W. Bush on torture.

"Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere... I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."~George W. Bush, June 2003

This goes with the below post.

We impeached Clinton for lying. Huh.

Another reason I'm no longer a Republican.

Torture: A Crime that Requires a Verdict

Borrowed from sojourners: http://blog.sojo.net/2009/04/17/torture-a-crime-that-requires-a-verdict/

Torture: A Crime that Requires a Verdict

by Jimmy McCarty 04-17-2009

Dear President Obama,
Thank you for making the four memos approving of and describing the torture done to children of God in our name public even though many pleaded for you not to. Thank you for letting me know that my tax dollars were used to torture those carrying God’s image. I have known we made helpless people think they were drowning for a while now, but now I know we kept some awake for almost two weeks straight. Now I know we put collars around the necks of defenseless people and slammed their heads into walls. And now I know we put people in boxes so small they couldn’t move and put insects in those boxes the prisoners thought could seriously injure them with no way of escape.

We cannot know what we need to repent of without knowing what sins we have committed. Thank you for letting me know. Now I pray that we as a nation ask for God’s forgiveness for what we, because of our fear and complacency, allowed to happen in our name and work to ensure it never happens again.

Thank you also for vowing that we will never do this again. As a Christian I know God declares these actions completely sinful. There is no theological or ethical justification for torturing another human being. In doing so we demonstrated that we place our faith not in God, or some abstract notion of justice or liberty, but in violence and power. These foundations will not sustain us. Those who live by the sword die by it, and I am now afraid that we have lived by torture so long that we will also die by torture. We must never torture again, and we must work to make amends for the sins we have already committed.

I am not in complete agreement with what you have said, however. You have said no one will be held accountable for the acts of torture because they were approved by the justice department. While I understand the premise of your reasoning, I think it is wrong.

Perhaps those interrogators who physically administered the acts of torture were following orders, but those who gave them were not. They made a decision to pervert justice. Those in the know have not apologized for their conduct or admitted it was wrong; in fact they have vehemently defended it. What they did was illegal according to multiple international treaties and laws. We have prosecuted people from other nations for doing the exact same things we did. We cannot sweep this under the rug. While it may be deemed unnecessary, or impractical, to prosecute all involved from the top down, someone must be held responsible. Those officials that perverted our previously agreed upon notions of justice must be held responsible.

There must be an independent commission of inquiry into the actions of the Bush administration. Everyone, from former President Bush and former Vice-president Dick Cheney down to the justice department, who made the decisions to approve of torture must be brought before the American public and be held responsible. It is the only way the rest of the world will believe we have discarded these evil methods and know we are no longer a nation that tortures. Not to do so is to be complicit in the cover-up of the ways we have sinned and the perpetuation of that reputation of us throughout the world.

It is a sad day in American history. May God have mercy on us.

Barack Dubya Obama

Same sh*t, different piles.

Okay, so remember how during Obama's campaign he got people like me to vote for him because he criticized George W. Bush's domestic spying surveillance program and said he'd end it?

Well, I do. That's a huge reason I voted for him. I was tired of Bush's trampling over our Constitution and treating us as terrorism suspects.

Remember when Obama's campaign website said that "The Problem" is described in part as the Bush administration having "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court"?

I do.

In February, President Obama's Justice Department quietly argued in a San Francisco court that it was maintaining the same position as President Bush's Justice Department on a case involving detainees trying to sue a private company for its role in their (allegedly) extraordinary renditions.

This time the issue was the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, and whether courts would be able to assess its constitutionality in a case called Jewel v. NSA, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the NSA surveillance by suing on behalf of AT&T customers whose records may or may not have been caught up in the NSA "dragnet."
Last Friday, while President Obama traversed throughout Europe, his Justice Department sought to have Jewel v. NSA dismissed because "the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction with respect to plaintiffs’ statutory claims against the United States because Congress has not waived sovereign immunity" and "because information necessary to litigate plaintiffs’ claims is properly subject to and excluded from use in this case by the state secrets privilege and related statutory privileges."

Argued the Justice Department: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair "has once again demonstrated that the disclosure of the information implicated by this case, which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security."

"President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again."

Exactly. Deja vu. French for WTF Obama? You are alienating those who voted for you. You know, the ones tired of Bush and his policies. But you are continuing them? Wow.

"beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they 'willfully disclose' to the public what they have learned...

"Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ -- using an absurdly broad rendition of 'state secrets' to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity -- are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself..."

Obama, you are going to lose your base. People like me. The majority of Americans voted for you because we opposed these policies. Do you think we'll vote for you again if you continue them?

Get it together, man.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/on-state-secret.html

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/09/tpm/index.html

More of the Constitution trampled upon by Bush's Legacy.

This is taken from a truthdig article. You can read the entire thing here.

Here are the highlights:

U.S. federal agents were preparing to arrest Youssef Megahed in Tampa, Fla. Just three days earlier, on Friday, a jury in a U.S. federal district court had acquitted him of charges of illegally transporting explosives and possession of an explosive device.

Megahed, acquitted by a jury of his peers, thought he was secure, back with his family. He was enrolled in his final course at the University of South Florida that would allow him to receive his college degree. Then the nightmare he had just escaped returned. His father told me: “Yesterday around noon, I took my son to buy something from Wal-Mart ... when we received a call from our lawyer that we must meet him immediately ... when we got to the parking lot, we found ourselves surrounded by more than seven people. They dress in normal clothes without any badges, without any IDs, surrounded us and give me a paper.

“And they told me, ‘Sign this.’ ‘Sign this for what?’ I ask him. They told me, ‘We are going to take your son ... to deport him.’”

Megahed is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a deportation proceeding. The charges are the same ones from which he was completely acquitted. In August 2007, Megahed and a fellow USF student took a road trip to see the Carolinas. When pulled over for speeding, police found something in the trunk that they described as explosives. Megahed’s co-defendant, Ahmed Mohamed, said they were homemade fireworks.

Prosecutors pointed to an online video by Mohamed, said to show how to convert a toy into an explosives detonator. Facing 30 years behind bars, Mohamed took a plea agreement and is now serving 15 years. Megahed pled not guilty, and the federal jury in his trial agreed with his defense: He was an unwitting passenger and completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
That’s where ICE comes in. Despite being cleared of the charges in the federal criminal case, it turns out that people can still be arrested and deported based on the same charges. The U.S. Constitution protects people from “double jeopardy,” being charged twice with the same offense. But in the murky world of immigrant detention, it turns out that double jeopardy is perfectly legal.

Ahmed Bedier, the president of the Tampa Human Rights Council and co-host of “True Talk,” a global-affairs show focusing on Muslims and Muslim Americans on Tampa community radio station WMNF, criticizes the pervasive and persistent attacks on the U.S. Muslim community by the federal government, singling out the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or JTTFs. The JTTFs, Bedier says, “include not only federal FBI agents, but also postal inspectors, IRS agents, deputized local police officers and sheriff’s deputies, any type of law enforcement,” and when one agency fails to take down an individual, another agency steps in. “It’s like an octopus,” he says.

Wow. I'm floored. This is entirely ridiculous. First the wiretapping and PATRIOT act. Guantanamo Bay. Then the John Yoo Memos. Now this? C'mon!! Wake up, people! This is George W. Bush's legacy. This is the Republicans' legacy. While they whine about the first lady returning the Queen of England's hug, they silently take away all that we hold dear.

Double Jeopardy. Habeas Corpus. Free Speech. Warrants. Due Process. All sacrificed to the "war on terror." We sure won that.

Its Tuesday, let's laugh at conservatives! (Torture Update)

John Yoo & Others: Europe calls for arrest for war crimes

Thanks to the Impolitic Blog & Jay McDonough for talking about this.

Those that have been following the Bush administration's legacy of war crimes through the use of legal memos written by John Yoo & others, giving the Executive Branch carte blanche to torture anyone, US Citizen or not, and throw them into a legal blackhole and deny any and all rights. In fact, those memos gave the Bush Administration (and any subsequent administration) authority to overturn Congress, the Supreme Court, and the US Constitution and its amendments in its search for terrorists, even if the suspects are US Citizens. Goodbye, habeas corpus, hello Gestapo!!

Anyway, Spain is just a little bit pissed off about the US committing these war crimes. Especially when the US tortured one of their citizens for information when he was charged with terrorism, but later realized he was innocent and sent him home. That didn't go over so well in Spain. They know torture when they see it, especially with their history blighted with the Inquisition. The Chief Magistrate in the case, Judge Baltasar Garzón, is Europe's best known counterterrorism judges. He has been involved in prosecuting the Basque terrorist group, ETA, as well as al Qaeda affiliated groups residing in Spain and Morocco, as well as the prosecution of former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

Under Magistrate Garzón, the Spanish court has forbidden cooperation with anything associated with Guantanamo Bay. After further investigation, Spain is likely to issue arrest warrants for many top Bush legal aids, including lawyer John Yoo and the Former Chief of Staff & Legal Counsel to Vice President Cheney, David Addington for drafting those memos. If those warrants are issued, John Yoo and David Addington would be barred from travel to Europe, since almost all of Europe is part of the European Extraditions Convention (and outside of that, most countries do formal extradition with Europe). If they were to step foot in Europe they would be prosecuted for war crimes.

Looks like we might finally be looking at some justice. Too bad no one has put Bush and Cheney on the list yet. That would be nice to see. We just might, though, with the news that even more damning evidence that the Bush admin tried to hide will be released. A New York federal judge has ordered the CIA to release all evidence about the torture that took place and the rationale for doing do. They have until April 9th to begin releasing the information.

Cheney defends Administration

Paul Begala's commentary at Cnn.com talked about Dick Cheney's recent interview with CNN--the first post administration interview granted--and has put the hypocrisy of our previous administration in a great--albeit a little harsher than I would--manner. I'm just going to repost part of the commentary here, but if you want to read the entire thing, click here.

Cheney says U.S. can torture but can't heal.
Dick Cheney has finally found the limits of government power.

According to recently released legal memos from the Bush-Cheney administration, the former vice president believes that the federal government can ignore the First Amendment and suppress free speech and freedom of the press as part of its "war on terror."

An October 23, 2001, memo from Justice Department lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty said, "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."

Former Vice PresidentCheney also believes, according to these same memos, that the federal government can send troops to burst into the homes of American citizens without a search warrant, despite the Fourth Amendment's protection against such unreasonable searches. He believes that the federal government has the right to arrest an American citizen on American soil and hold him in prison without charges. He believes that the federal government can listen in on your phone conversations without a court order.

Cheney believes that the federal government can ignore the Geneva Conventions, binding treaties largely written by the United States, signed by the president and ratified by the Senate. He believes that the federal government can commit torture, despite laws and treaties making torture a crime.

As the Washington Post reported, "Starting in January, 2002, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion of prisoners in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials."

The newspaper said, "Cheney and his allies ... did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government."
In fact, Yoo has said the federal government has the power to grab your young son and crush his private parts if the president thinks that will help the "war on terror."

Think I'm kidding? Here's the verbatim exchange from a debate between Yoo and Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel:
Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty ...
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo ...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.

...If the government can censor the free press, restrict free speech, listen in on your private conversations, burst into your home, take you away, hold you in prison without charges and torture you, it raises an interesting question: What on Earth does Dick Cheney think the federal government can't do?

Thanks to John King, we now know: Cheney believes that the government cannot help with health care, improve education or wean America off Middle East oil. I'm not kidding.

Cheney, whose authoritarian impulses run deep, is suddenly worried that the federal government might become too powerful under President Obama.

"I worry a lot," he told King, "that they're using the current set of economic difficulties to try to justify a massive expansion in the government, and much more authority for the government over the private sector. I don't think that's good. I don't think that's going to solve the problem."

...Set aside the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the greatest expansion of the federal role in health care since President Lyndon B. Johnson...

...Cheney is comfortable with a government that has the authority to torture, imprison, censor and kill. Just not a government that has the capacity and compassion to write a health insurance policy or take on Big Oil.