Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Baghdad Burning

6.29.2006 Rosa Brooks: Did Bush commit war crimes? -- Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld could expose officials to prosecution.

The Hamdan decision may change a few minds within the administration. Although the decision's practical effect on the military tribunals is unclear — the administration may be able to gain explicit congressional authorization for the tribunals, or it may be able to modify them to comply with the laws of war — the court's declaration that Common Article 3 applies to the war on terror is of enormous significance. Ultimately, it could pave the way for war crimes prosecutions of those responsible for abusing detainees.

Common Article 3 forbids "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." The provision's language is sweeping enough to prohibit many of the interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration. That's why the administration had argued that Common Article 3 did not apply to the war on terror, even though legal experts have long concluded that it was intended to provide minimum rights guarantees for all conflicts not otherwise covered by the Geneva Convention.

But here's where the rubber really hits the road. Under federal criminal law, anyone who "commits a war crime … shall be fined … or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death." And a war crime is defined as "any conduct … which constitutes a violation of Common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva." In other words, with the Hamdan decision, U.S. officials found to be responsible for subjecting war on terror detainees to torture, cruel treatment or other "outrages upon personal dignity" could face prison or even the death penalty.

Similarly, in his short one-page opinion -- signed by Justice Kennedy (as well as Ginsberg and Souter) -- Justice Breyer explained that absent emergency, the Constitution requires that the President comply with Congressional law even in areas which lay at the heart of national security:

Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation’s ability to deal with danger. To the contrary, that insistence strengthens the Nation’s ability to determine—through democratic means how best to do so. The Constitution places its faith in those democratic means. Our Court today simply does the same.

The (fatal) applicability of that paragraph to the administration's general theory of executive power is manifest. Just as Congress denied the President authority to create military commissions which violate the law of war, so, too, has Congress denied the President the authority to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants (and to torture detainees, etc.), and -- just as is the case with military commissions -- there is simply no legal justification for the President to ignore those laws.

MARGARET WARNER: John Yoo, you were the co-author, famously, or a co-author of what some people call the "torture memo," but it was a memo, Justice Department memo that argued that, in fact, the Geneva Convention did not apply to these detainees and, therefore, different kinds of more extreme interrogation methods were certainly permissible.

Does this ruling knock the pins out from under that position that you and others in the administration took? And, if so, what are the implications?

6.30.2006 NYT: "Justices, 5-3, Broadly Reject Bush Plan to Try Detainees" By LINDA GREENHOUSE

...In an important part of the ruling, the court held that a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 applies to the Guantánamo detainees and is enforceable in federal court for their protection.

The provision requires humane treatment of captured combatants and prohibits trials except by "a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people."
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The flaws the court cited were the failure to guarantee the defendant the right to attend the trial and the prosecution's ability under the rules to introduce hearsay evidence, unsworn testimony, and evidence obtained through coercion.
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Justice Stevens said that because the charge against Mr. Hamdan, conspiracy, was not a violation of the law of war, it could not be the basis for a trial before a military panel.

(Here)

6.29.2006 "Senate deals blow to Net neutrality"

6.29.2006 "Supreme Court Blocks Bush, Gitmo War Trals"

6.29.2006 "Official Charged in Abramoff Scandal -- Interior Employee Received Gifts"

6.28.2006 Glenn Greenwald:

Prior to the "treasonous" Times articles, The Terrorists already knew that we were eavesdropping on their international calls and monitoring their banking transactions -- because that information was previously, and repeatedly, put into the public domain, often by the Bush administration and President Bush himself. What the Times revealed is the lack of oversight and checks on these intelligence-gathering activities, not the existence of the activities themselves, which were already well known.

To assert that we need not worry about anything because there is "no evidence of abuse" -- that we should keep our heads down and go about our business -- is plainly, even painfully, illogical. The reason we don't want the Government to be able to act without oversight is precisely because they can then abuse its powers without being detected, i.e., without there being any "evidence of abuse." If the Bush administration exercises these powers with no governmental oversight -- as it does -- how does Michael Barone think there would be any evidence of abuse if, in fact, the administration was abusing its power?
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The defining ethos of our country is a distrust of government power --

6.25.2006 "Former Bush Assistant Secretary of State says don't 'accept the crap we give you'" (Here)

6.25.2006 High Court Saves Some Best Cases for Last

It is tough to tell the court's direction so early in the tenures of Roberts and Alito, most court-watchers say.

Justices have lined up some significant cases for next fall, on abortion, public school affirmative action and the environment.

"Justices are willing to test the new lineup right away. Next year is where the rubber is going to hit the road," said John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor.

Glenn Greenwald: When the President and the Vice President assure us that all of their actions are in "full accordance with the law," what they mean by "the law" is what is described in the Yoo Memorandum. For everything broadly relating to the undeclared and eternal "war" on terror -- not just on international battlefields but domestically as well -- decisions are "for the President alone to make." Pursuant to this theory, even when the President acts in violation of what we used to understand as "the law" (i.e., acts of Congress which are signed into law by the President), he is still acting "in accordance with the law," because the power to make such decisions rests exclusively with him.

Mr. Safavian, a former lobbyist, had a hand in federal spending, first as chief of staff of the General Services Administration and then as the White House's chief procurement officer, overseeing a kitty of some $300 billion (plus $62 billion designated for Katrina relief). He arrived to help enforce a Bush management initiative called "competitive sourcing." Simply put, this was a plan to outsource as much of government as possible by forcing federal agencies to compete with private contractors and their K Street lobbyists for huge and lucrative assignments. The initiative's objective, as the C.E.O. administration officially put it, was to deliver "high-quality services to our citizens at the lowest cost."

The result was low-quality services at high cost: the creation of a shadow government of private companies rife with both incompetence and corruption. Last week Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who commissioned the first comprehensive study of Bush administration contracting, revealed that the federal procurement spending supervised for a time by Mr. Safavian had increased by $175 billion between 2000 and 2005. (Halliburton contracts alone, unsurprisingly, went up more than 600 percent.)
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Nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies.To see the impact of such revolving-door cronyism, just look at the Homeland Security process that mandated those cutbacks for New York and Washington. The official in charge, the assistant secretary for grants and training, is Tracy Henke, an Ashcroft apparatchik from the Justice Department who was best known for trying to politicize the findings of its Bureau of Justice Statistics. (So much so that the White House installed her in Homeland Security with a recess appointment, to shield her from protracted Senate scrutiny.) Under Henke math, it follows that St. Louis, in her home state (and Mr. Ashcroft's), has seen its counterterrorism allotment rise by more than 30 percent while that for the cities actually attacked on 9/11 fell. And guess what: the private contractor hired by Homeland Security to consult on Ms. Henke's handiwork, Booz Allen Hamilton, now just happens to employ Greg Rothwell, who was the department's procurement chief until December. Booz Allen recently nailed a $250 million Homeland Security contract for technology consulting.

And DoD News July 29, 2005: "Booze (sic) Allen Hamilton Inc., McLean, Va., is being awarded a $16,434,832 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for training, education, engineering, technical and management support services for the Royal Saudi Naval Forces (RSNF) under the Foreign Military Sales Program. This contract includes a base year and four one-year options which, if exercised, would bring the total estimated value of the contract to $99,998,617."
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"This contract was not competitively procured, but was a sole source directed to Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. by the Government of Saudi Arabia via Letter of Offer and Acceptance."

6.24.2006 "Executive Order: Protecting the Property Rights of the American People "

"Might they not protect me out of all I own?" The King and I

... The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.
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Treasury officials said Swift was exempt from American laws restricting government access to private financial records because the cooperative was considered a messaging service, not a bank or financial institution.
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Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."
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While the banking program is a closely held secret, administration officials have conducted classified briefings to some members of Congress and the Sept. 11 Commission, the officials said. More lawmakers were briefed in recent weeks, after the administration learned The Times was making inquiries for this article.

["Why does it take a newspaper investigation to get them to comply with the law?" the senator (Arlen Specter) asked. "That's a big, important point."] h/t Hume's Ghost

Swift's 25-member board of directors, made up of representatives from financial institutions around the world, was previously told of the program, but it is not clear if other participants know that American intelligence officials can examine their message traffic.
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In terrorism prosecutions, intelligence officials have been careful to "sanitize," or hide the origins of evidence collected through the program to keep it secret, officials said.
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In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans had no constitutional right to privacy for their records held by banks or other financial institutions. In response, Congress passed the Right to Financial Privacy Act two years later, restricting government access to Americans' banking records.

The program's legitimacy was established by a presidential executive order signed 10 days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he added.
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Dean Baquet, editor of The Times, said: "We weighed the government's arguments carefully, but in the end we determined that it was in the public interest to publish information about the extraordinary reach of this program. It is part of the continuing national debate over the aggressive measures employed by the government."
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The SWIFT information is added to a massive database that officials have been constructing since shortly after Sept. 11. Levey noted tat SWIFT did not have the ability to search its own records. "We can, because we built the capability to do that," he said.

Treasury shares the data with the CIA, the FBI and analysts from other agencies, who can run queries on specific individuals and accounts believed to have terrorist connections, Levey said Thursday in an interview with The Times.

Levey said that "tens of thousands" of searches of the database have been done over the last five years.
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The National Security Agency, which can intercept communications around the world, is eavesdropping on the telephone calls and e-mails of some U.S. residents without obtaining warrants. And it has been accused of asking telecommunications companies to help create a database of the phone-call records of almost all Americans.
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During the last five years, SWIFT officials have raised concerns about the scope of the program, particularly at the outset, when it was handing over virtually its entire database. The amount of data handed over each month has been winnowed down.
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But the operation seems to have been kept secret from key segments of the banking industry, including senior executives in the United States and overseas.
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Lee Hamilton, a former congressman and co-chairman of the commission who said he has been briefed on the SWIFT program, said U.S. intelligence agencies have made significant progress in recent years, but are still falling short. "I still cannot point to specific successes of our efforts here on terrorist financing," he said.

6.23.2006 "License to lie -- In his devastating new book, (The One Percent Doctrine) Ron Suskind shows how 9/11 allowed George W. Bush and his shadowy courtier, Dick Cheney, to "create whatever reality was convenient." By Gary Kamiya, Salon

And if it is necessary to understand our enemy, it is also necessary to understand the risk that we could become the very thing we fear. Nietzsche wrote, “He who fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster himself. And when you stare long into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.” Secrecy and lies in the service of a higher good—it has a Marxist, a fascist, a theocratic sound. Little by little, under the guise of “national security”—since the birth of the republic, always the greatest threat to American values—Cheney and his blustering, deeply devout accomplice have steered America away from its priceless legacy as a land governed by laws, debate and transparency, and toward something none of us would want to recognize. (Here)

The commission found that US intelligence on Iraq's WMD had been wrong, and it recommended to the president 74 ways in which the US intelligence effort could be improved.

Mr Bush has now accepted 70 of those recommendations.

6.24.2006 Larry Beinart:

Once he had the war, he and his people planned it ineptly and executed it disastrously. It's his ineptitude and his disaster. When the Democrats call for a date to end the war, they're trying to solve Bush's problems for him. They can't. On a realistic level, simply because he won't listen. On a political level because it puts things on Bush's terms and makes the Democrats sound like they're concerned with mere costs rather than with a moral vision.

6.23.2006 A Look at Republican Priorities: Comforting the Comfortable A New York Times Editorial

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed an estate-tax cut that is a repeal in everything but name. The so-called compromise would exempt more than 99.5 percent of estates from tax, slash the tax rates on the rest and cost at least $760 billion during its first full decade. Of that, $600 billion is the amount the government would have to borrow to make up for lost revenue from the cuts, which would benefit the heirs of America’s wealthiest families, like the Marses of Mars bar and the Waltons of Wal-Mart Stores. The remaining $160 billion is the interest on that borrowing, which would be paid by all Americans.

First, as reported first this morning by Raw Story, the House Judiciary Committee today approved by voice vote a resolution "requesting" that the Justice Department and the President "turn over all requests made by the National Security Agency and other federal agencies to telephone service providers to obtain information without a warrant." The adoption of this resolution was completely unexpected, and received the support of Republican Committee Chair James Sensenbrenner, who had previously excoriated the Administration for "stonewalling" Congressional investigations into their surveillance activities on Americans.
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Perhaps Congress is slowly beginning to regain some dignity and purpose and insist upon imposing some limits on the President's monarchical powers.
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The judiciary is also showing some incipient signs that it exists. (Here) Read this whole section, especially the questions from Judge Vaughn R. Walker.

6.22.2006 TPM Muckraker:

"So who are those bigger fish?

Of course, Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) -- whose political ad is ironically featured in this Ohio paper's story on Safavian's conviction -- is next, virtually everyone can agree, despite his flack's absurd insistence that "The Safavian case had nothing to do with Congressman Ney."

However one reacts to this ruling, the issue here is that while Justice Scalia likes to puff himself an "originalist," the reality is that this decision not only reverses the Bill of Rights, prohibiting unreasonable searches, but also English common law and the doctrine of "knock and announce," which for eight centuries has mandated that police must identify themselves and wait a reasonable time before entering someone's home.

Apparently, to Justice Scalia, "originalism" really means coming up with something original.

So what are the rich to do? Well, they can buy the new $50.00 gold pieces, which are worth $800.00, in the "proof" version. We are selling the mint for dollars. Is anyone going to make a pile of money out of this deal? Well, probably. It was the brainchild of Tom Noe, a Bush Pioneer. See this article from the Toledo Blade telling how he became an advisor to the mint, and this article, describing various Ohio scandals in which he was involved. He has pleaded guilty to money laundering of his Bush contributions. (Here) When I last heard, he had "pleaded not guilty to a 53-count felony theft and corruption indictment for his handling of Ohio's rare-coin fund" (Here) And here is an article showing how all this connects with the votes in Ohio in 2004. (It also says that Noe collected Beanie Babies)

Noe thought he was going to make a pile of money. Now, someone else will.

6.20.2006 Interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr. regarding election fraud

PRWeek: Have you gotten any reaction from the Republican Party on this?
Kennedy: I've gotten, certainly, reaction in the blogosphere. But most of the reaction has been supportive.

PRWeek: Is there a next step?
Kennedy: I've been meeting with attorneys... to devise a litigation strategy. And I would say that very soon we'll be announcing lawsuits against some of the individuals and companies involved.

This book (The One Percent Solution) augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.
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(A Pentagon unit headed by Douglas Feith was set up as an alternative to the C.I.A., to provide, in Mr. Suskind's words, "intelligence on demand" to both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the office of the vice president.)

But I would like to offer some advice to my fellow pundits: face reality. There are some commentators who long for the bipartisan days of yore, and flock eagerly to any politician who looks "centrist." But there isn't any center in modern American politics. And the center won't return until we have a new New Deal, and rebuild our middle class.

As for Snow's contention that for the US to get out of Iraq would be a defeat in the war on terror, it is exactly the opposite. The US occupation of Iraq is now reviving the terror movement among Muslim radicals. This is the conclusion of experts such as Fawaz Gerges and Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin. The quicker we end the miltiary occupation, the sooner we will stop inadvertently training the next generation of terrorists who want to hit us.

And, anyway, as the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi demonstrates, there is no real need to worry about terrorism flourishing in western Iraq. The neighbors-- Jordan, Syria and Turkey-- would never put up with it, for fear it would spill over onto them. And as that operation showed, the Jordanians are better at tracking down Arab terrorists than the US military (yes, it does help to know Arabic fluently).

The CIA's history problem vis a vis the IWG is in fact our history problem, as the information control maintained by the CIA over what history can be told shapes what we believe and legitimate as social and national memory. Such history, however, can be a charade that has little connection to what in fact occurred in the past. And it is here that the control of archives and records becomes a social problem out of which ignorance about the real past can flourish and infantilize the public.

At least we now have a clearer understanding of what our real history is with notorious Nazis. Unfortunately, the long-term control over the records and archives wrestled away from the CIA by the IWG leaves us to dwell on the question as to how do you invoke justice against ghosts?

But the timing of a pardon, the attorney suggested, likely would depend on the outcome of the midterm elections.

If Republicans retain control of Congress, Bush could act swiftly. But if Democrats win control of the House or Senate, Bush might wait, and use Libby's trial as an excuse not to cooperate with any congressional investigations into the leak.

The telephone companies bought another ad at Jesus' General. It's the one on the right about the future of the internet. Considering the telcos' past, I'm guessing that part of that future includes spying on us for the NSA. That and selling the internet to Wal-Mart. That's what Our Leader's "Ownership Society" is all about, keeping the owned powerless.

On June 5, 2006, the Muckraker Report contacted the FBI Headquarters, (202) 324-3000, to learn why Bin Laden’s Most Wanted poster did not indicate that Usama was also wanted in connection with 9/11. The Muckraker Report spoke with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI. When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden’s Most Wanted web page, Tomb said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
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Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

At least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security — including the department's former secretary, Tom Ridge; the former deputy secretary, Adm. James M. Loy; and the former under secretary, Asa Hutchinson — are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars' worth of domestic security business.
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But the experience in the short life of the agency shows that the law often does little to prevent former officials from moving quickly to lobby the government on domestic security matters on behalf of their new bosses or clients.

Perhaps the biggest loophole was created in late 2004 at the request of senior department officials, when the first big wave of departures began. The Office of Government Ethics approved a request by the department to split it into seven components for the purposes of the ethics rules. Once in the private sector, most former department officials were prohibited for one year from lobbying the same component where they once worked.

That meant that Mr. Petrucelli technically complied with the ethics rules even though he left the Homeland Security Department and within months started pitching GridPoint products to the Coast Guard. The reason: the Coast Guard is not part of the component that contained Mr. Petrucelli's former agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services.

6.17.2006 Craig Crawford: "He is the stereotypical belligerent male that women often complain about, preferring to stay lost rather than stop and ask someone for directions."

6.17.2006 Stop This Land Grab From The LA Times, By Wade Graham

The proposed sale of federal land in Washington County, Utah, is spectacular, in the scale of both its greed and its shamelessness. Legislation has been drafted to allow county officials to steal 25,000 acres of public land near Zion National Park to benefit themselves and well-connected private developers.
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But Washington County's attempted water heist isn't just a local crackpot scheme: 25 million people in seven states (California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming) and Mexico depend on the Colorado River. A new tap puts everyone's supplies in jeopardy. The county seat, St. George, already has the highest water consumption of any desert city in America: 335 gallons a person a day, twice the national average. (By comparison, Phoenix uses just 170 gallons a person a day by using basic conservation measures). The plans to expand St. George sevenfold indicate a total disconnect from reality because Washington is the driest county in the second-driest state in the country.

The Bush White House did not invent the presidential signing statement; it goes back to the 19th century. But the frequency and ambition of Bush's signing statements go far beyond his predecessors. Whereas earlier presidents issued signing statements of a highly specific nature, those of Bush are repeatedly broad and unspecific. Above all, they make claims to enhanced executive power that impinge on profound issues of liberty such as torture or wiretapping.
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To their credit, even some Bush supporters are alarmed. If Bill Clinton had done what Bush is doing, the Republican senator Chuck Hagel has pointed out, Congress would be up in arms. If Bush were to bequeath the powers he claims to Hillary Clinton, the right would soon go berserk with indignation at the threat to American values. Which is why the most pertinent comment so far on the president's strategy has come from the anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist. He told Drew: "If you interpret the constitution's saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws, you don't have a constitution: you have a king."

It is not anti-American to warn about what Bush is doing. On the contrary, it is profoundly pro-American. In 1776 Americans issued their declaration of independence. They demanded a new form of government in place of the "repeated injuries and usurpations" to which they had been subjected. In the long list of grievances that followed, the first was that King George had "refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good". That suddenly has a contemporary ring. Now, as then, America's problem is a usurping king called George.

TRENTON, June 15 — The New Jersey attorney general has issued subpoenas to five telephone companies to determine whether any of them violated the state's consumer protection laws by providing records to the National Security Agency. Experts say it is the first legal move by a state to question the agency's program to compile calling records to track terrorist activities.
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The question of whether phone companies have turned over customer records to the spy agency already has spawned a handful of lawsuits. Some companies have denied surrendering the records; others denied wrongdoing or declined to comment. For instance, a federal judge in San Francisco has scheduled a hearing for next Friday in a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights advocacy group that seeks to enjoin phone companies from turning over records and seeks damages for affected customers.
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The American Civil Liberties Union has filed complaints in 22 states demanding that attorneys general and utility regulators officials investigate whether consumer protection laws have been violated. Officials in a few states in addition to New Jersey. including Vermont, Maine and Washington, have promised to investigate.

6.16.2006 Holden:

War in Iraq -- Last week I noted that the nation's largest military installation, Fort Hood, is undergoing a severe budget crunch as Chimpy's Vanity War continues to drain funds from the Department of Defence.

Today we learn that another Texas military base, Fort Sam Houston, is in danger of losing electrical services due to non-payment of bills.

Heckuva job, Rummy!

6.16.2006 "Political Talking Points from Pentagon Office may have been illegal" ABC News

See also: Carpetbagger

I've obtained a copy of the Lautenberg letter and the senator makes a pretty compelling case that the Pentagon went way over the line on this one. Here's the letter to Rumsfeld from Lautenberg in its entirety (sans footnotes):