26%

"It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing."

Patrick Fitzgerald, regarding the Libby case

6.29.2007 Not One More Roberts or Alito By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute noted this week in Roll Call, the issue-ad decision demonstrated "not a careful, conservative deference to Congress" but instead "a willingness by Roberts to toss aside Congress' conclusions to fit his own ideological predispositions" -- the very definition of judicial activism.
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And if conservatives claim to believe the president is owed deference on his court appointees, they will be -- I choose this word deliberately -- lying. In 2005 conservatives had no problem blocking Bush's appointment of Harriet Miers because they could not count on her to be a strong voice for their legal causes. They revealed that their view of judicial battles is not about principle but power. When they went after Miers, conservatives lost the deference argument.

What is the moral of this story? Pay more attention to the structural background of judicial nominations, and less attention to whether a nominee sounds like a nice guy. Nobody should have been fooled by the Roberts nomination. If we pay attention to how partisan entrenchment works, we will follow the Who's advice-- we won't get fooled again.

Supreme Court to Review Guantanamo Cases By Pete Yost
The court did not indicate what changed the justices' minds about considering the issue. But last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military officer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the U.S. military has been using for the past four years to classify the detainees as enemy combatants.
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An Army reserve officer and lawyer who played a key role in the enemy combatant hearings at Guantanamo Bay says tribunal members relied on vague and incomplete intelligence while being pressured to rule against detainees, often without any specific evidence. The officer's affidavit, submitted to the Supreme Court last Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Hilzoy has the Declaration of the Army reserve officer and lawyer (Here)

If Mr. Murdoch does acquire The Journal, it will be a dark day for America’s news media ­ and American democracy. If there were any justice in the world, Mr. Murdoch, who did more than anyone in the news business to mislead this country into an unjustified, disastrous war, would be a discredited outcast. Instead, he’s expanding his empire.

Cheney has crushed the normal interagency process that permitted communication, cross-fertilization and cooperation at the sub-Cabinet level through all previous modern administrations. At the same time, he has isolated Cabinet secretaries, causing them to be fired when they contradicted him, as he did with Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill.

Cheney thrives in darkness, operating by stealth within the government, and makes a cult of secrecy. None of these insights are new, except for additional telling details. Reports the Post: "Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped 'Treated As: Top Secret/SCI.'"
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He has transformed an office that Franklin D. Roosevelt's first vice president, John Nance Garner, said was "not worth a bucket of warm piss" into one of vast power. Cheney has acted as the Stalin of the Bush administration, the master of the bureaucracy, eliminating one rival after another, ruthlessly and unscrupulously concentrating power, the culmination of a more than 30-year career. The Post articles are based on information provided by dissidents who have suffered at Cheney's hand and have given Post reporters stories proving that Cheney's whole point is power.
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The president's plight is not that of a removed ruler tragically kept from knowing what his government is doing in his name. He has had time to observe the consequences. He is aware of what Cheney says to him. The Decider decides that Cheney will decide what the Decider decides. This is not a case of if-only-the-czar-knew. In the seventh year of his presidency, Bush's decision making consists of justifying his previous decisions.
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These are Cheney's final days; this is his endgame. He will never run again for public office. He is freed from the constraints of political consequences. He now has no horizon. He lives only in the present. He is nearly done. There are only months left to achieve his goals.

A review of memos, e-mail and other contracting documents obtained by The Washington Post show that in a rush to meet congressional mandates to establish the information analysis and infrastructure protection offices, agency officials routinely waived rules designed to protect taxpayer money. As the project progressed, the department became so dependent on Booz Allen that it lost the flexibility for a time to seek out other contractors or hire federal employees who might do the job for less.
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When Booz Allen finally faced competition last year, Homeland Security had broken the work into five contracts. In total, those contracts were worth more than $50 million over a year's time.When Booz Allen finally faced competition last year, Homeland Security had broken the work into five contracts. In total, those contracts were worth more than $50 million over a year's time.

Booz Allen won them all.

... Do you know who the Vice President of Booz Allen is? James Woolsey. Do you know what he works on for Booz Allen?

He advises companies on how to protect themselves from potential threats and vulnerabilities, including direct risks to personnel, information, and physical properties and equipment-as well as indirect risks to business markets and channels, supply chains, and external infrastructure.

Precisely the focus of the DHS contract. Do you think it a coincidence that one of Cheney's close neocon supporters would magically benefit from such a colossally bad contract? Like magic!!!

6.28.2007 Red State Welfare By TIMOTHY EGAN

Thus, the American Farm Bureau, which represents some of the biggest corporate welfare recipients, is terrified that a motley mix of peasants are now at the door with pitchforks. On their Web page, the bureau warns members that "forces outside of agriculture" are demanding change. The audacity! The farm bureau's attitude to the taxpayer is: just write the check and shut up.
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The farm bill sets the rules for the American food system and helps to subsidize obesity. It rewards growers of big commodity crops like corn, soybeans and wheat ­ the foundation of our junk food nation. So, a bag of highly processed orange puff balls with no nutritional value is cheaper than a tomato or a peach. Wonder why.

The reformists, by and large, are not trying to get in on the gravy train. They want to revitalize rural America, to encourage farmers' markets, contribute to environmental health and to make it easier for poor people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.

In Congress, Jeff Flake, a maverick Republican from Arizona who angered party leaders by taking on earmarks, and Ron Kind, a Democrat who represents dairy country in Wisconsin, are leading the charge. There is likely to be a huge fight later this summer, because the old guard who protect the farm lobby are embedded deep in the early-stage committees.

But now the pain is being felt by Wall Street. The two big Bear Stearns hedge funds that neared collapse last week were full of tricky investments tied to subprime mortgages. To try to ensure that hundreds of billions of dollars worth of similar investments don’t also plummet, endangering the financial system, Congress may finally have to do more to help lower-end borrowers. That, in turn, would prop up the investments based on their mortgages.

We’re all for helping distressed borrowers. And we accept government’s role, if necessary, to avert a financial collapse. But in the end, intervention on behalf of Wall Street would be an outrage, because Wall Street ­ abetted by lax federal regulation ­ is largely to blame for this fiasco. Wall Street firms encouraged the issuance of risky loans to troubled borrowers and then reaped a windfall by packaging them as investments for hedge fund clients.

The Supreme Court hit the trifecta yesterday: Three cases involving the First Amendment. Three dismaying decisions by Chief Justice John Roberts’s new conservative majority.
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The decision contained a lot of pious language about protecting free speech. But magnifying the voice of wealthy corporations and unions over the voice of candidates and private citizens is hardly a free speech victory.
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Nor did the court’s concern for free speech extend to actually allowing free speech in the oddball case of an Alaska student who was suspended from high school in 2002 after he unfurled a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” while the Olympic torch passed. The ruling by Chief Justice Roberts said public officials did not violate the student’s rights by punishing him for words that promote a drug message at an off-campus event. This oblique reference to drugs hardly justifies such mangling of sound precedent and the First Amendment.

The law increases the penalties for wrongdoing committed out of hatred of the victim because of factors like race, religion, age, sexual orientation or disability. Beat up someone for being, say, Jewish or black or gay, and you will do extra prison time if convicted. The theory is that a crime motivated by hatred can affect an entire community, not just the victim.

But as critics see it, the law punishes thought. The actions themselves ­ assault, for example, not to mention murder ­ are already serious crimes. Adding years to a mugger’s sentence because he dislikes Jews or blacks or gays amounts to a penalty for holding beliefs that society considers unacceptable. So the critics would say.The law increases the penalties for wrongdoing committed out of hatred of the victim because of factors like race, religion, age, sexual orientation or disability. Beat up someone for being, say, Jewish or black or gay, and you will do extra prison time if convicted. The theory is that a crime motivated by hatred can affect an entire community, not just the victim.

And there lies an Orwellian slippery slope, they say. What other thoughts might one day be deemed impure? Some object to the creation of different classes of victims; they say it undermines the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”
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Slippery slopes. They are what happens, some say, when the law does not let actions speak for themselves, and climbs into people’s heads in often fruitless attempts to figure out what is rattling there.

6.25.2007 "Cast of Characters -- Key Players in the Cheney series."

6.25.2007 More Classification Games by emptywheel

This was an attempt by Congress to counter-act over-classification of materials that Congress is now being forced to try to reauthorize in such a fashion so that it can do it's job. Bush is starving it for funds. In the end, this board created to put some more rationality to the declassification process, has never once been able to declassify anything.

All because Cheney doesn't want us to know about the fanciful story he spun about Mohammed Atta.

2.8.2007 "Cheney Tangles With Agency on Secrecy" By Chitra Ragavan

6.25.2007 The answer is in the question: "Of Sarajevo and Baghdad" By ROGER COHEN, International Herald Tribune

Iraq did not grow more humane, not yet anyway. The world is still dangerous, possibly more so. When I spoke to Power the other day, she said something sad but probably true:

"Humanitarian intervention - the nonconsensual use of force - is dead. It had a very short life - September 1995 to the summer of 2003 - and it's been killed for the next decade. America is the only power than can do it and, after Iraq, we would just be recruiting fodder for this apocalyptic nihilism."

"The only person in Washington who cares less about his public image than David Addington is Dick Cheney," said a former White House ally. "What both of them miss is that ..... in times of war, a prerequisite for success is people having confidence in their leadership. This is the great failure of the administration -- a complete and total indifference to public opinion."
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Two questions remain, officials said. One involves techniques to be authorized now. The other is whether any technique should be explicitly forbidden. According to participants in the debate, the vice president stands by the view that Bush need not honor any of the new judicial and legislative restrictions. His lawyer, they said, has recently restated Cheney's argument that when courts and Congress "purport to" limit the commander in chief's warmaking authority, he has the constitutional prerogative to disregard them.

Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. This article begins a four-part series that explores his methods and impact, drawing on interviews with more than 200 men and women who worked for, with or in opposition to Cheney's office. Many of those interviewed recounted events that have not been made public until now, sharing notes,e-mails, personal calendars and other records of their interaction with Cheney and his senior staff. The vice president declined to be interviewed.

I love that Cheney was able to bully Colin Powell, Pentagon generals and George Tenet when drumming up his fake case for war, but when he tried to push around the little guys, the National Archive data collectors ­ I’m visualizing dedicated “We the People” wonky types with glasses and pocket protectors ­ they pushed back.

Archivists are the new macho heroes of Washington.

As General Odom says, the endgame will start “when a senior senator from the president’s party says no,” much as William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam. That’s why in Washington this fall, eyes will turn once again to John Warner, the senior Republican with the clout to give political cover to other members of his party who want to leave Iraq before they’re forced to evacuate Congress. In September, it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said that Iraq was “drifting sideways” and that action would have to be taken “if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function.”

Mr. Warner has also signaled his regret that he was not more outspoken during Vietnam. “We kept surging in those years,” he told The Washington Post in January, as the Iraq surge began. “It didn’t work.” Surely he must recognize that his moment for speaking out about this war is overdue. Without him, the Democrats don’t have the votes to force the president’s hand. With him, it’s a slam dunk. The best way to honor the sixth anniversary of 9/11 will be to at last disarm a president who continues to squander countless lives in the names of those voiceless American dead.

Consciously or unconsciously, from the mid-'40s to the mid '60s Hollywood also glorified the "strong, silent type" who stood against the crowd in one way or another--High Noon and "Shane" and many of the films of Humphrey Bogart being noteworthy examples. Although Gary Cooper and Alan Ladd both violently bring order to the town and Bogart shoots Major Strasser, all do so reluctantly, and are not really rewarded for their efforts.

Now not only do prominent people applaud "24" but conformity and groupthink, once seen as the undoing of democracy, are encouraged as we slide farther from our ideals, and true heroes, those who stand against the consensus in the name of resuscitating our national ideals, are villified. Perpetuating these trends in the post-Bush era is a recipe for civic violence, and it would behoove the entertainment industry and opinion makers to understand and reverse this. ...

See also Scalia, 24, Who Needs Laws?

“In the national forests, big money was not king,” wrote Pinchot. The Forest Service was beloved, he said, because “it stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government bureau had done before.”

A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.

In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line ­ the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, peppered with questions about the dispute today, called it "a little bit of a non-issue" and asserted that Cheney is "exempt" from the reporting requirement in the executive order.

President Bush is the "sole enforcer" of the executive order and "did not intend for the vice president to be treated separately from how he would treat himself," Perino said. She maintained that Bush and Cheney "are complying with all the rules and regulations regarding the handling of classified material."
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As the "author" of the executive order and "the person responsible for interpreting" it, Bush "did not intend for the vice president to be treated as an agency," Perino said.

See also War and Piece:

PERINO: If you look on page 18 of the EO, when you have a chance, there’s a distinction regarding the Vice President versus what is an agency. And the President also, as the author of an EO, and the person responsible for interpreting the EO, did not intend for the Vice President to be treated as an agency, and that’s clear.

Last night, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported that his staff fact-checked Perino’s claim, looked at page 18 of the order, and found Perino’s claim to be false:

OLBERMANN: No exemption at all for the Vice President on page 18. So we emailed the White House, which referred us to section 1.3 — which is about something else altogether — and 5.2 — which makes no mention of the Vice President. In fact, there is no exemption for the President or the Vice President when it comes to reporting on classified material.

See also: Josh Meyer

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project, disputed the White House explanation of the executive order.

He noted that the order defines "agency" as any executive agency, military department and "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information" — which, he said, includes Bush's and Cheney's offices.

See also Eli:

Now, it seems to me that, as CREW observes, Cheney must be in one branch or the other (or both) but there’s no way he can be in neither. And if he has to pick just one branch to belong to, I would think it would behoove him to pick the one controlled by his own party. Not to mention, y’know, the one that his nominal boss is in. Because, call me crazy, but Cheney’s claim that he does not belong to the executive branch sounds like an admission that he does not work for the President. Or, indeed, for anyone. While this is probably accurate, I’m pretty sure it was never intended to be common knowledge.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd also declined to respond to the allegations but did say that the appellate section's recent track record "speaks for itself." He cited statistics showing that when the section filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the past six years, it had an 87 percent success rate, compared with 61 percent success in the previous six years

Better writing? Better judges?

And even at this late date, the president has still not nominated a replacement for Lam -- Lam's Executive Assistant United States Attorney Karen Hewitt has been serving as an interim since February 16th.

So why the hurry in getting Lam out of the office? The Justice Department still hasn't provided a convincing explanation. (Here)

Laying the groundwork to get Smith reelected, Rove set up a cabinet-level task force on Klamath River issues to specifically study whether diverting water from Klamath River to farmers would hurt the endangered Coho salmon population. The task force Rove set up gave the impression that the administration was going to take an unbiased look at the situation.

According to Michael Kelly, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist, that wasn't the case. Kelly spoke out publicly in 2003 alleging that he was subjected to political pressure and ordered to ignore scientific evidence that said the plan would likely kill off tens of thousands of Coho salmon, and to support the Klamath River low-water plan Rove wanted enacted to help farmers, who Rove saw as a crucial part of the Republican constituency in the state.

For now, I want to focus on another, much less prominent but equally important part of the opinion -- the second paragraph of footnote 16, on page 59.

God I love the internet!

Following up on an item from yesterday, the GAO reported that in a sampling of the president’s signing statements, “the Bush Administration failed to execute the law as instructed in over 30 percent of the cases.” We probably shouldn’t breeze by this point too quickly — Congress passed a bill, Bush signed the bill into law, and then, in several instances, after the president issued signing statements, the Bush administration decided not to do when the law mandated.

What kind of law-breaking are we talking about here? Well, in one instance, the law required the Defense Department to prepare a report on how Iraq war funding would be spent in its 2007 budget request. The administration then ignored the requirement. In another instance, the law required Customs and Border patrol to relocate its checkpoints in the Tucson area every seven days, in order to improve patrol effectiveness. The Bush gang took the law as a suggestion and ignored this, too.

In all, the GAO found six specific instances in which executive-branch agencies disobeyed the law after the president issued signing statements explaining Bush’s intention to ignore the law.

But the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer on this issue, added an important point: the GAO’s investigation doesn’t include the big stuff.

None of the laws the GAO investigated included the president’s most controversial claims involving national security, such as his assertion that he can set aside a torture ban and new oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act because he is the commander in chief. Such material is classified.

6.13.2007 A Letter to the RNC from former CIA Officers

As former intelligence officers -- most of us have served the United States in undercover positions -- we are saddened and appalled by the recent public comments of former Senator Fred Thompson, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former Governor Mitt Romney -- one a potential candidate and the other two declared candidates for the Republican nomination for president -- with respect to the perjury and obstruction of justice conviction of Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

These men misrepresent the case against Mr. Libby and call into question the integrity of a respected Federal Judge and U.S. attorney. Their positions with respect to the just and fair punishment meted out to Mr. Libby raise serious questions about their commitment to the rule of law free of partisan bias.

The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. "They know nothing of Pakistan," a former senior U.S. diplomat said.

Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney's office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I'm told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney's aides, rather than taken to the State Department.

Dan Froomkin: Hersh exposes another executive-power end-run by the White House: "By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military -- including the Pentagon's covert task forces -- for the purposes of 'preparing the battlefield' could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress."

In other words, declare the world your battlefield and the military your intelligence service -- and suddenly there's no need to tell Congress anything.

Q Tony, the DOJ has started an investigation of the -- or is considering an investigation under the Foreign Practices Act of the billions of dollars that were allegedly paid to Prince Bandar over a period from 1985 to the present, going through a variety of God knows what projects in the Middle East and elsewhere. Given the close relationship of Prince Bandar to the Bush family, to the national security establishment here, and to the office of the Vice President, is the White House prepared to let such an investigation proceed and let the chips fall where they may?

MR. SNOW: As you know, the White House does not, in fact, get involved in making those decisions. That's a Department of Justice decision. I don't know anything about it. If it's true, they will proceed. I can neither confirm it nor deny it because I don't know anything about it.

6.17.2007 Glenn Greenwald quotes Anatole Kaletsky

What people are talking about in America is not whether the invasion of Iraq was legally or morally justified but why it went so disastrously wrong and whether the same blundering fanatics will launch another catastrophic military adventure, most likely a bombing campaign against Iran, to distract attention from failure in Iraq. After all, the neoconservative ideologues who still run the Bush Administration have nothing left to lose politically -- and in their fevered imaginations they still think they could inflict military defeat on the "Islamofascists" in what they now see as an even greater historical confrontation than the Cold War.

True, the Washington mob isn't as sexy as the Gotti or Soprano clans, but there is now a gripping nonfiction dramatization of its machinations available gratis on the Internet, no HBO subscription required. For this we can thank U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who presided over the Scooter Libby trial. Judge Walton's greatest move was not the 30-month sentence he gave Mr. Libby, a fall guy for higher-ups (and certain to be pardoned to protect their secrets). It was instead the judge's decision to make public the testimonials written to the court by members of the Washington establishment pleading that a criminal convicted on four felony counts be set free.
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In Washington, however, hypocrisy is a perennial crime in both parties; if all the city's hypocrites were put in jail, there would be no one left to run the government. What is more striking about the Libby love letters is how nearly all of them ignore the reality that the crime of lying under oath is at the heart of the case. That issue simply isn't on these letter writers' radar screen; the criminal act of perjury isn't addressed (unless it's ascribed to memory loss because Mr. Libby was so darn busy saving the world). Given that Mr. Libby expressed no contrition in court after being convicted, you'd think some of his defenders might step into that moral vacuum to speak for him. But there's been so much lying surrounding this war from the start that everyone is inured to it by now. In Washington, lying no longer registers as an offense against the rule of law.
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No wonder Victoria Gotti denigrated "that mob in Washington." When the godfathers of this war speak of never leaving "a fallen comrade" on the battlefield in Iraq, as Mr. Ajami writes of Mr. Libby, they are speaking first and foremost of one another. The soldiers still making the ultimate sacrifice for this gang's hubristic folly will just have to fend for themselves.

See also Bill Moyers, who says: "Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as “a man…of personal integrity”—without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion." via emptywheel

There is a hint here of the Horse's Head hypothesis. Maybe Wilson was not Cheney's target.

6.17.2007 NYT Editorial: Why Protect Shady Gun Dealers?

At issue is a pernicious gift to the gun lobby known as the Tiahrt amendment, after Representative Todd Tiahrt, the Kansas Republican who attached it to the spending measure in 2003. It limits the ability of federal officials to release data showing the path from manufacture to retail purchase of a gun that was recovered in a crime. Representative Patrick Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Representative Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, are expected to seek its repeal.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she will oppose the Tiahrt amendment. Lawmakers in favor of preserving the absurd restrictions have a duty to explain why they are more interested in protecting rogue gun dealers than in protecting the public.

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.

“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.
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“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

Seriously - when you spend this much, and bear in mind that the cost of past and current military expenditures comes in at about 41% of all expenditures (28% if you just want to count current military spending) you have to turn around and ask - what are we getting for this?

The answer, as far as I can see, is “not much”.
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The founders argued that large standing armies were inimical to liberty, to democracy, to the health of the economy and to peace itself. I’d say they knew what they were talking about.

6.15.2007 Mystery Cunningham Figure Pleads Guilty By Paul Kiel

One of the hanging threads of the Duke Cunningham case has been the fate of Thomas Kontogiannis, the Greek businessman implicated in Cunningham's plea for bribing the congressman. Today, The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Kontogiannis actually pled guilty back in February, but that the documents had been under seal until now
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Kontogiannis' guilty plea was signed on February 9th (you can read it here), just days before Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney who led the Cunningham investigation, but who was fired along with seven other U.S. attorneys last year, stepped down. The deal carries a maximum sentence of ten years, but Kontogiannis' plea likely means he'll get less. There is nothing in the plea agreement to indicate that Kontogiannis is actively cooperating with prosecutors to implicate others. Kontogiannis is scheduled to be sentenced November 26th.

Do you think that Carol Lam knew about this?

-- When Carol Lam, the former U.S. attorney for San Diego, asked to stay on the job longer in order to deal with some outstanding prosecutions (the expanding Duke Cunningham case among them), Elston told her not to think about her cases, that she should be gone in "weeks, not months" and said "these instructions were 'coming from the very highest levels of the government.'" (Here)

emptywheel sheds some additional light: "One more note. Consider the timing on this. Kontogiannis signed the plea deal on February 9--several days before Lam notified Main DOJ on February 13 she was going to indict Wilkes and Foggo. But that first sealed document was filed after Lam left." (Here)

The only political aspirants among those three groups who failed to meet the test of their generation were the chickenhawks. And our problem today is that they are the ones in charge of the government as we face a national security threat. These unfulfilled men still have something to prove.

And, I suspect because their leadership of the "conservative" movement has infected the new generation, we are seeing much of the same pathology among younger warhawks as well. This is why we hear the shrill war cries of inchoate bloodlust from these quarters every time the terrorists strike. It's a primal scream of inner confusion and self-loathing. These are people whose highest aspirations and deepest longings are wrapped up in their masculinity, and yet they are flaccid failures. They are in a state of arrested development, never having faced their fears, never becoming men, remaining boys standing in the corner of the darkened hallway watching Bill Clinton emerge from a co-ed's dorm room to lead a rousing all night strategy session --- and sitting in the bus station on the way home for Christmas vacation as Chuck Hagel and John Kerry in uniform, looking stalwart and strong, clap each other on the back in brotherly solidarity and prepare to see what they are really made of. They have never been part of anything but an effete political movement in which the stakes go no higher than repeal of the death tax.

6.18.2007 Habeas Corpus - Reverse the erosion

Advocates who suggest we compromise our civil liberties in the name of national security like to think there are no mistakes, no innocents who are being wrongly caught in law enforcement's net. But such errors do occur, and without review by a fair and impartial court, they cannot be corrected.

The writ of habeas corpus is a pledge we grant to everyone — however accursed in the eyes of society — that even the jailer must answer to a higher authority. As we challenge the depraved threat of terrorism, our three nations must honor and restore a right that helped us emerge from the Middle Ages.

Our nations' lawyers stand as one in support of habeas corpus.

Karen J. Mathis president of the American Bar Association. Fiona Woolf, CBE, president of the Law Society of England and Wales. J. Parker MacCarthy, Q.C., president of the Canadian Bar Association.

The Cry of the Disappeared By ROGER COHEN

... President George W. Bush acknowledged last year that some individuals deemed particularly dangerous had been moved “to an environment where they can be held secretly.” In effect, categorized as enemy combatants, they have been “disappeared.”

This practice is unconscionable. It does not matter that the purpose of the disappearance is not murder, as it was in Argentina.

Once people disappear, every basic human right is at risk because every check, every balance, has gone with them. The worst becomes almost inevitable because there is nothing to stop it.

The United States demands accountability of others when its own people go missing. It must demand the same accountability of itself, whatever the fight. The lovely, longing and lost young faces of Latin America require at least that.

Ever since Nixon, the Republicans have been getting away with criminal behavior when they are in power. Nixon was allowed to resign and was pre-emptively pardoned. His minions all took their punishment like men, however, and did their time without complaints. But that was the last time. After the multiple crimes committed in Iran-Contra --- big ones, to do with national security and unconstitutional executive power-grabs --- the Republicans decided they had nothing to lose by pardoning their criminal underlings and so they did.

Once Bill "he's not my president" Clinton was elected, the rules changed of course, and they tried to run him out of office with endless partisan witch hunts and impeachment over consensual sexual behavior. For the coup de grace, they had a full-blown hissy fit over his pardon of Marc Rich --- who was represented by Scooter Libby! Now they are clutching their pearls once again about a Republican being the victim of the long arm of the law and the pundits (and now some Democrats) are whining about how he must never see the inside of a jail because he is such a fine fellow and the horrible Republican appointed prosecutor was out to get him.

6.13.2007 Homeland Security under fire for plans to finance new facility By Chris Strohm via emptywheel

That prompted House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman David Price, D-N.C., and ranking member Harold Rogers, R-Ky., to single out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for creating the Bush administration's equivalent of an earmark.

In this case, they said, Chertoff made a unilateral decision to divert money away from state and local grants to support the Alabama training center.

"This is outrageous," Rogers said at the hearing. "By the Constitution, no dollar can be spent but for an appropriation of the Congress. That's as elementary as you can get.
...
Rogers said he was also furious that the department plans to use state and local grant funding for the project.

I noted last week that, by replacing Dan Bartlett with Ed Gillespie, Bush has added a proven firewall to the White House staff.

Via ThinkProgress, CNN/Money points out another benefit of Ed Gillespie (depending on your perspective). Bringing Gillespie on board brings big lobbyist clients right into the oval office. Companies like Sirius, Qualcomm, Amgen, and Genentech that have pending business before the Administration. And, Gillespie won't have to recuse himself from any discussions of this pending business:

See also: Quinn Gillespie & Associates

In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.
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In so-called equal-access cases, the department has mostly won court rulings allowing religious organizations like the Child Evangelism Fellowship to have the same access to public school students as nonreligious groups, a principle generally approved by a divided Supreme Court in 2001.

In the candy cane case, for example, school officials in Westfield, Mass., had suspended students for handing out candy canes with religious messages, saying it was disruptive and lurid. The students said that the “J” shape represented Jesus and the red stripes his blood, the white his purity. In a pending case from San Diego, the government defended the city’s campground lease to the Boy Scouts, which had been challenged because of the group’s religious tenets. The department has also challenged so-called Blaine amendments, which are state constitutional provisions enforcing separation of church and state more rigidly than does the United States Constitution. The federal government sued because the amendments could impede Mr. Bush’s religion-based initiative, which provides money to religious groups for social programs.

"Schlozman: What I Really Meant Was...""
"Former U.S. attorney U-turns on testimony"

"U.S. Grant Winds Up as 2 Ships Gone Awry"

"Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate"

"Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them 'enemy combatants,'" the court said.
...
"Although al-Marri was not personally engaged in armed conflict with U.S. forces, he is the type of stealth warrior used by al-Qaeda to perpetrate terrorist acts against the United States," wrote Hudson, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Bush. The other two judges were appointed by President Bill Clinton.
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Last August, a federal judge in Detroit said the government's domestic spying program violated constitutional rights to free speech and privacy, and the constitutional separation of powers. Five months later, the Bush administration announced it would allow judicial review of the spying program run by the National Security Agency.
What? Did I miss something? Perhaps he means secret FISA oversight of individual cases.
...
The court also said the government failed to back up its argument that the Authorization for Use of Military Force, enacted by Congress immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, gives the president broad powers to detain al-Marri as an enemy combatant. The act neither classifies certain civilians as enemy combatants, nor otherwise authorizes the government to detain people indefinitely, the court ruled.

New rules: first the trial and then the verdict.

See also: Adam Liptak

Under the administration’s theory, Mr. Hafetz said, “the executive could effectively disappear people by picking up any immigrant in this country, locking them in a military jail and holding the keys to the courthouse. This is exactly what separates a country that is democratic and committed to the rule of law from a country that is a police state.”

This ruling is another strong argument for bringing Mr. Bush’s detention camps under the rule of law. Congress can do that by repealing the odious Military Commissions Act of 2006, which endorsed Mr. Bush’s twisted system of indefinite detentions, by closing Guantánamo Bay and by allowing the courts to sort out the prisoners — not according to the whims of one president with an obvious disdain for the balance of powers but by the rules of justice that have guided this nation for more than 200 years.

"Mr. Comey has confirmed what we suspected for a while -- that White House hands guided Justice Department business," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "The vice president's fingerprints are all over the effort to strong-arm Justice on the NSA program, and the obvious next question is: Exactly what role did the president play?"

The Senate Intelligence Committee has signaled to the White House that an infamously abusive secret CIA program to interrogate high-level al-Qaida types may have to be scrapped, given "the damage the program does to the image of the United States abroad." It is a stinging rejection of a program that President Bush late last year called "one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American history" and comes as administration lawyers are reportedly crafting new, secret rules to govern it.
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And the Intelligence Committee said in these new comments that the skepticism might have come much earlier, if only the White House hadn't kept all the panel members except the chair and the ranking minority member in the dark for the past five years. "The administration's decision to withhold the program's existence from the full committee membership for five years was unfortunate in that it unnecessarily hindered congressional oversight of the program."
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Meanwhile, the status of the CIA's secret interrogation program remains unclear. President Bush said that the network of secret prisons used for interrogations was empty when he unveiled the program late last year. But then on April 27, the Pentagon announced that Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former top advisor to Osama bin Laden, had arrived at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He had been in CIA custody for months, but the agency had declined to alert the International Committee of the Red Cross of his detention. His treatment at the hands of the CIA during that period is unknown.

... Because nearly 90 percent of intelligence contracts are classified and the budgets kept secret, it's difficult to draw up a list of top contractors and their revenues derived from intelligence work. Based on publicly available information, including filings from publicly traded companies with the Securities and Exchange Commission and company press releases and Web sites, the current top five intelligence contractors appear to be Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, General Dynamics and L-3 Communications. Other major contractors include Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, DRS Technologies and Mantech International. The industry's growth and dependence on government budgets has made intelligence contracting an attractive market for former high-ranking national security officials, like former CIA director George Tenet, who now earns millions of dollars working as a director and advisor to four companies that hold contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and do big business in Iraq and elsewhere.
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In the Cunningham case, many of MZM's illegal contracts were funded by "earmarks" that he inserted in intelligence bills. Earmarks, typically budget items placed by lawmakers to benefit projects or companies in their district, are often difficult to find amid the dense verbiage of legislation -- and in the "black" intelligence budgets, they are even harder to find. In its recent budget report, the House Intelligence Committee listed 26 separate earmarks for intelligence contracts, along with the sponsor's name and the dollar amount of the contract. The names of the contractors, however, were not included in the list.