I Hate What You Just Said

The Minnesota Supreme Court just ruled unanimously in favor of Al Franken.

Obama wants to close Guantanamo Bay because of its association with the Bush brand. But he’s working hard to ensure that he can imprison anyone he wants, for as long as he wants, at some other location:

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

According to some of “Obama’s top legal advisors, along with a handful of influential Republican and Democratic lawmakers,” Obama is considering the creation of a “national security court” that will oversee the detention of “detainees deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be charged or tried.”

This is just arbitrary executive detention dressed in a black robe. You can call it a “national security court,” but it only exists to deny the right to a fair trial — you know, that pesky Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution and Article 10 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenting justice in a Supreme Court judgment on behalf of a 13 year-old girl who was strip searched by Arizona school officials who were looking for . . . tablets of Advil:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old schoolgirl violated the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

In a closely watched case filled with poignant facts, the court ruled 8-1 that Arizona school officials violated student Savana Redding’s Fourth Amendment rights when they searched her down to her bra and underpants. Officials were looking for pain relievers, which they didn’t find.

The details of the search were pretty unbelievable:

A school nurse and administrative assistant, both female, took Redding into a back room.”With both officials staring at Savana, she took off her pants and her shirt,” Redding’s legal brief recounted.

“The officials did not notice any pills hidden in Savana’s clothing, on her body, or under her panties or bra. Still, they told Savana to pull out her panties and bra and to move them to the side.”

The strip search exposed Redding’s “genital area and breasts” to the school officials and was “the most humiliating experience” in the girl’s life, according to a legal brief. It didn’t detect any pills or contraband, and Redding said it harmed her.

Sounds dreadful. Did I mention that she was an honor student? How is a judge supposed to respond to such a clear violation of this student’s right to privacy?

If your name is Clarence, like this:

Justice Clarence Thomas was the only member of the court to decide that the search of Redding was reasonable.

Thomas is making the world safe, one pair of panties at a time.

And although they voted with the other 6 justices, Scalia and Roberts appeared close to supporting the invasive search. Justice Scalia used the same logic that governed the search for WMD in Iraq:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia . . . sounded sympathetic to the school’s actions, with Scalia in particular suggesting that “the drugs must be in her underpants” if every other reasonable hiding place on the student had been searched.

And I suppose, by that reasoning, if no Advil were found in her underwear then school officials would be forced to take the inquiry into the vagina and colon. And if that doesn’t work there’s always the water board or sensory deprivation to break the case. Then we’ll get to the bottom of this analgesic cabal.

Nice work, gentlemen.

As long as no super rich tax evaders go to jail, I’m all for it.

The U.S. Justice Department may drop a legal case aimed at forcing Swiss bank UBS AG <UBSN.VX> <UBS.N> to reveal the names of 52,000 wealthy American clients suspected of offshore tax evasion, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

It seems he’s at it once again (remember this time?  And this one?)  Pat Buchanan - who regularly appears in the big commerical media and is generally accepted as a mainstream (if idiosyncratic) pundit - appears to think that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination is worse than segregation, slavery, etc.  In other words, he likes the old-school racism better than affirmative action. Check it out:

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance — No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review — her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

…

…Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.

This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy” [bold added].

Lots of people have problems with affirmative action.  I know.  But this is beyond insane.  The “old bigotry,” it seems to me, involved slavery, the slave trade and middle passage, segregation, beatings, lynchings, cross-burnings, and a host of other brutalities.  The “bigotry” that Buchanan really hates, however, is that which helps people from traditionally oppressed groups get opportunities to go to college and such.

Pat’s Analysis:

-Slavery and Jim Crow:  Not great.

-Hispanic Woman goes to Princeton:  Worse.

Right.  Got it.

Scott Roeder, the Christian religious extremist who killed an abortion provider in Kansas City told reporters that “many other similar events [are] planned around the country.” Today, an 88 year-old man shot up the Holocaust museum in our nation’s capital.

We need to find out if these two incidents are connected. Were these men working together? Is there a network of angry white terrorists lurking in our cities, planning to kill other Jews and physicians?

Clearly, there is only one way to discover this critical information before any more attacks occur: enhanced interrogation.

Building rapport with prunes isn’t going to work, goddamnit — I want to see that 90-year old man strung up from the rafters and deluged with freezing cold water until he tells us where the other geriatric terrorists are hiding and what their next objective is. Roeder needs the waterboard. And find out if he’s afraid of any bugs, menstrual blood, dogs, tight spaces, or deafening levels of gangsta rap.

And it’s time for the good, law-abiding folk to arm ourselves in our museums — along with our national parks, churches, schools, and bars.

The Bush administration was marked by secrecy and a lack of respect for core principles of democratic governance.  And so far, the Obama administration is on rather the same page:

The CIA argued yesterday that Bush-era documents detailing the videotaped interrogations of detainees should not be released, citing national security concerns, reports the Washington Post

…

CIA director Leon Panetta argued in a statement that releasing the material “could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed.”

Panetta wrote that the “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would give al-Qaeda “propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds.” He called it “ready-made ammunition.”

An ACLU lawyer told the Post that Panetta is in effect arguing: “The greater the abuse, the more important it is that it should remain secret.”

From today’s Boston Globe:

Senior Justice Department lawyers in 2005 sought to limit tough interrogation tactics against terror suspects, but were overruled.

The NY Times’ article on the subject has serious and misleading errors.

Nothing makes me more proud to be an American than when our inalienable rights become alienable:

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out more than three dozen lawsuits claiming that the nation’s major telecommunications companies had illegally assisted in the wiretapping without warrants program approved by President George W. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

David Petraeus admits that the US violated the Geneva Conventions.

Sotomayer should rule according to the law, not empathy . . . unless the case is about a white dude.

America’s suckiest laywer challenges the intellect of Obama’s Supreme Court pick.

If you didn’t see it, you should read it.

This NPR report was very eye-0pening.

If this report is true, the CIA tortured long before they received any legal cover from the OLC or DOJ lawyers. So much for the “we were told it was legal” defense. Even better, the only legal advice they received was a direct conversation with the president’s personal lawyer, Alberto Gonzales.

I’m sorry, Mr. Zubaydah, the CIA seems to have lost the journal volumes that might exonerate you. Guess we’ll just have to roll with the evidence that proves you’re guilty.

This is funny. Forget about who conceived, created, authorized and engaged in horrific, illegal, and immoral torture. Burn Pelosi! She’s a witch.

Bowing to political pressure, Obama has reversed his promise to appoint a jurist with empathy.

Meet Justice Terminator:

When NPR asked him about president Obama’s desire to select an “empathetic” judge for the Supreme Court, Alberto Gonzales remarked:

I do worry a little bit, well, I worry, I worry about about justices on the court making decisions based on what they think makes them feel good. I don’t think it’s fair to expect society to anticipate the outcome of a case based upon what makes a justice feel good. In essence what you’re saying, I think, is that I’m going to, I don’t care what the law says, I’m going to come out, I’m going to pursue an outcome that I think is fair and just. I’m going to rewrite the law. And I think that’s dangerous.

You should know!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi came out swinging today at a press conference and clearly stated that the Bush administration and the CIA had mislead Congress. I know we’re no longer a country of laws, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could use them again?

That beeping sound you hear is the ship of state being thrown into reverse. Obama just pulled a 180 and has now decided that releasing more detainee abuse photos will “endanger our troops.”

Makes perfect sense!

Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who participated in anti-terrorism activities and interrogations, is testifying today before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.  He claims that high-level intelligence was gained through legal techniques, not by the kinds of torture advocated by our former VP, the Dick of Darkness.  In particular, Soufan says the high-priority interrogation of Abu Zubaydah disproves the repugnant case that the Dick of Darkness is currently trying to make:

Soufan said that when he used [legal Army Field Manual interrogation methods] on Zubaydah, they produced actionable intelligence in less than an hour.

As for torture, said Soufan: “This amateurish technique is harmful to our long-term interests. It plays into the enemies playbook” [bold added].

It has become apparent that lawlessness and secrecy were the order of the day during the GWB administration.  But this story, via Glen Greenwald, does not reflect well on the Obama DOJ, either.  The story revolves around Binyam Mohamed, who was tortured and held in Guantanamo for six years, and America’s attempt to keep evidence from coming to light in Britain.  Greenwald:

In February, Obama’s DOJ demanded dismissal of Mohamed’s lawsuit against the company which helped “render” him to be tortured on the ground that national security would be harmed if the lawsuit continued.  Then, after a British High Court ruled that there was credible evidence that Mohamed was subjected to brutal torture and was entitled to obtain evidence in the possession of the British government which detailed the CIA’s treatment of Mohamed, and after a formal police inquiry began into allegations that British agents collaborated in his torture, the British government cited threats from the U.S. government that it would no longer engage in intelligence-sharing with Britain — i.e., it would no longer pass on information about terrorist threats aimed at British citizens — if the British court disclosed the facts of Mohamed’s torture. 

As a result of the American threats, the British High Court ruled that it would keep crucial evidence of Mohamed’s torture under wraps.  And, according to Greenwald, the new administration appears to be helping to cover up the crimes of the old one:

In the aftermath of that ruling, there was some dispute about whether the Obama administration had really issued this threat to Britain or whether it was merely a residual threat from the Bush administration.  But in the wake of a recent motion by Mohamed’s lawyer to the British court for re-consideration of its ruling, in response to which the British government submitted the written threats from the Obama administration, there can now be no doubt not only that Obama made these threats to Britain, but did so in a remarkably extreme and heavy-handed manner.

The rule of law is really, really in trouble.

There’s an article today in the New York Times titled “Industry Pledges to Control Heath Care Costs.” The article explains how the lobbyists of the health care industry have made solemn promises to the Obama administration that they will “voluntarily” work to reduce the cost of health care over the next few years:

Doctors, hospitals, drug makers and insurance companies will join President Obama on Monday in announcing their commitment to a sharp reduction in the growth of national health spending, White House officials said Sunday.

The officials said the plan could save $2,500 a year for a family of four in the fifth year and a total of $2 trillion for the nation over 10 years. That could make it less expensive for Congress to enact comprehensive health insurance coverage, a daunting challenge facing the Obama administration.

At this point, administration officials said, they do not have a way to enforce the commitment, other than by publicizing the performance of health care providers to hold them accountable.

By offering to hold down costs voluntarily, providers said, they hope to stave off new government price constraints that might be imposed by Congress or a National Health Board of the kind favored by many Democrats.

[my emphasis]

What I want to know is why the industry didn’t decide to do this before? You’re telling me it’s “voluntary” now? And all this time you’ve been telling me that the magic of capitalism is always working to ruthlessly enforce efficiency and innovation — thus ensuring that we receive services at the lowest possible price.

I can’t wait to hear these same people argue that government “price constraints” will introduce market inefficiencies that will reduce quality and increase costs.

I hate what you just said.

Today’s New York Times delivers the bad news:

An internal Justice Department inquiry has concluded that Bush administration lawyers committed serious lapses of judgment in writing secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations but that they should not be prosecuted, according to government officials briefed on its findings. [. . .]

The findings, growing out of an inquiry that started in 2004, would represent a stinging rebuke of the lawyers and their legal arguments.

Serious lapses in judgment? That sounds like something that goes into your permanent file when you prank the high school principal. At least 98 people died in the custody of US interrogators. 34 of them have been ruled homicides. At least 12 were tortured to death. And these are just the ones that we know about; there are hundreds of people who were “disappeared,” and can’t be accounted for.

My bad. Won’t happen again. This “stinging rebuke” is punishment enough. I’ll carry the knowledge of this lack of judgement with me for the rest of my days.

Upon learning of David Souter’s intent to vacate his position on the Supreme Court, President Obama issued a statement about the characteristics he will look for in a replacement jurist. Obama stated that he would find a candidate who is “dedicated to the rule of law,” and who “honors our constitutional values.” Someone with “integrity,” “a record of excellence,” and “an independent mind.”

But the final characteristic that Obama mentioned has caused great consternation on the political right. I’m speaking, of course, of empathy:

I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book.  It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives — whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.

I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes.

Republican sentator, Orrin Hatch, is deeply concerned about such a candidate:

Well, it’s a matter of great concern. If he’s saying that he wants to pick people who will take sides — he’s also said that a judge has to be a person of empathy. What does that mean? Usually that’s a code word for an activist judge. But he also said that he’s going to select judges on the basis of their personal politics, their personal feelings, their personal preferences. Now, you know, those are all code words for an activist judge, who is going to, you know, be partisan on the bench.

Yes, seeing the law as something other than a soulless slave to self-interested corporations is a serious concern. The law has nothing to do with people! We can’t have judges who have feelings or even preferences.

I, for one, welcome our new cyborg appointee.

“By definition,” she repeated, “if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

– Condi Rice

Fail.

Serious media critics understand that punishing people who are guilty of crimes is just petty vengeance, not justice.

John McCain on the role of lawyers:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) warned Thursday that any attempt by the Obama administration to prosecute the Bush-era lawyers who wrote memos signing off on waterboarding would start a “witch hunt.”

“If you criminalize legal advice, which is basically what they’re going to do, then it has a terribly chilling effect on any kind of advice and counsel that the president might receive,” McCain said during an interview on CBS’s “Early Show.”

The former GOP presidential nominee and POW supported Obama’s decision to end the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques but insisted that those who gave legal advice should not be prosecuted because they were “sworn to do their duty to the best of their ability.”

“Look, I didn’t agree, as you said, with the techniques - and I’d be glad to continue that debate with people. But to criminalize their legal counsel, unless you can prove that they intentionally violated existing laws or ethics, then this is going to turn into a witch hunt,” he said.

McCain compared the potential prosecutions with the actions of “banana republics” that “prosecute people for actions they didn’t agree with under previous administrations.”

Yes, the old chilling witch hunt defense. Just try to use that in a real life courtroom:

“Your Honor, when I donned that ski mask and robbed First National Bank I was acting on the advice of my attorney that such things were perfectly legal. Now I appreciate that you think what I did was illegal. And perhaps I shouldn’t have trusted his University of Phoenix law degree. But I never intentionally broke any laws and if you insist on prosecuting me you’ll create a chilling effect on legal counsel and foster the atmosphere of a witch-hunt.”

If you ask me, the only chilling effect we’re likely to see as a result of prosecuting these crimes is the one that affects legal opinions that are issued to give cover to patently illegal acts.

Sweet Fancy Moses!

Steny “wiretap” Hoyer now joins Jane Harman in faux outrage over the idea that Congress might be the subject of government wiretaps:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday he had “great concern” over news reports that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) was wiretapped during a federal probe into Israeli agents, and he vowed to personally look into whether there should be an investigation into wiretapping of Members of Congress.

“The stories that I’ve read give me great concern. I’m going to be in the process personally of finding out more about it and then, with the Speaker, determining what action, if any, needs to be taken,” Hoyer said Wednesday during a meeting with reporters.

There is literally no other person in the entire country who worked harder to allow the Bush administration to illegally wiretap American citizens and then provide immunity to the officials and telecommunications companies who carried it out. No person in (or out) of government put more blood, sweat, and tears into ensuring that the Bush administration would be vested with unchecked, Amendment-destroying powers than Steny Hoyer. He was a collaborator — the tip of the Vichey Dem spear. But now that those powers have been used to scour his inbox or monitor his web browsing or tape his calls, he’s furious.

This is like the family of Muhammad Atta demanding a refund from American Airlines.

That’s Rich Lowry.

In his piece in the National Review titled “The Case for the ‘Torture Memos’,” Lowry tries to argue that the torture memos are something of which our nation can be proud.  I am not kidding.

The debate over the just-released Justice Department memorandums on interrogation techniques ended as soon as they were dubbed the “torture memos.” Forevermore, they will be remembered as the legal lowlights of a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” as Pres. Barack Obama put it.

Rightly considered, the memos should be a source of pride. They represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms. Most societies throughout human history wouldn’t have bothered [bold added].

With all due respect, Rich, the “while adhering to its legal commitments and norms” part is just plain wrong.  The Bush administration was doing the opposite - the administration was trying to create legal language that would allow the administration not to adhere to legal commitments and norms.  And this was a pattern. In the name of the war on terror, the administration rejected (even mocked) the Geneva Conventions, pretended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act didn’t exist, violated the fourth amendment, and threw habeas corpus out the window.  Adhering to the law is not the same thing as creating language that allows you not to adhere to the law.  Its the opposite.

The release of the torture memos is not an occasion to pat ourselves on the back, Rich.  Rather, it’s the opposite.

Virtuoso of irony, Glenn Greenwald, just eviscerated Jane Harman.

I love this argument that nobody is guilty of breaking the laws on torture because the crackerjack legal team at the DOJ said it was legal. I have to echo this commenter from TPM:

If only Saddam Hussein had been smart enough to solicit a legal opinion from his government lawyers that gassing people was within the law, he could have been playing golf in Myrtle Beach right now.

The news just broke.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. But if they had waterboarded him 184 times, we would have cracked Al-Qaeda wide open. Guaranteed.

But now that Liberal pansies have exposed our interrogation techniques, none of them will work ever again.

Click here for TPM’s links to the four torture memos released by the Justice Department.   The first of the Office of Legal Counsel  memos is from 2002, the others from 2005.

One of the memos describes waterboarding in horrifying detail, then claims that it qualifies as “a controlled acute episode,” rather than torture, as “the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering.”   Bent Sorensen, on the other hand, who is a former member of the U.N. Committee Against Torture, says the following:

It’s a clear-cut case: Waterboarding can without any reservation be labelled as torture.  It fulfils all of the four central criteria that according to the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT) defines an act of torture.

First, when water is forced into your lungs in this fashion, in addition to the pain you are likely to experience an immediate and extreme fear of death. You may even suffer a heart attack from the stress or damage to the lungs and brain from inhalation of water and oxygen deprivation. In other words there is no doubt that waterboarding causes severe physical and/or mental suffering – one central element in the UNCAT’s definition of torture.

In addition, the CIA’s waterboarding clearly fulfils the three additional definition criteria stated in the Convention for a deed to be labelled torture, since it is 1) done intentionally, 2) for a specific purpose and 3) by a representative of a state – in this case the US.

The NSA is still violating the privacy of American citizens:

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

Even members of Congress aren’t safe:

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Leon Panetta

The good news:

The CIA is decommissioning the secret overseas prisons where top al Qaida suspects were subjected to interrogation methods, including simulated drowning, that Attorney General Eric Holder, allied governments, the Red Cross and numerous other experts consider torture, the agency said Thursday.

In an e-mail to the agency’s work force outlining current interrogation and detention policies, CIA Director Leon Panetta also announced that agreements with the private security firms guarding the so-called black sites will be “promptly terminated,” and contractors no longer will be used to conduct interrogations.

The bad news:

Panetta, however, said that CIA officers who were involved in interrogations using “enhanced” methods authorized by the Justice Department during the Bush administration “should not be investigated, let alone punished” [bold added].

The message:  We’re going to curb our most abhorrent behaviors, but we’re going to give the Bush administration a pass on its illegal actions.

Translation of the message:  The law does not apply to the powerful.

But don’t worry — a Rainbow Coalition is coming together, in love, to protect marriage:

Don’t take away my right to arbitrarily disenfranchise other Americans and force everyone to live like me. Boo-hoo.

The Green Mountain state legislature voted today to legalize same-sex marriage.

Vermonters are now steeling themselves for sudden outbreaks of bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery and man-on-dog sex.

I discussed the International Committee of the Red Cross report, which contains very serious details of possible torture of alleged terrorism suspects in U.S. custody in this previous post.  The report is now available online - click here to read it in pdf format.

The report refers to fourteen particular detainees, and its allegations of their “ill treatment” are sobering.   Here’s an excerpt:

The general term “ill treatment” has been used throughout the following section [of the report], however, it should in no way be understood as minimising the severity of the conditions and treatment to which the detainees were subjected.  Indeed, as outlined [in a following section of the report], and as concluded by this report, the ICRC clearly considers that the allegations of the fourteen include descriptions of treatment and interrogation techniques - singly or in combination - that amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Obama’s DOJ wants the case against the NSA’s illegal, warrantless eavesdropping dismissed.

It’s more or less official now - as long as they don’t have illicit sex, presidents can do more or less whatever they like.  From Charlotte Dennett :

Those of you following the George W. Bush prosecution trail will be interested to know that Patrick Leahy’s “truth commission” is a no-go. I was in a meeting with Leahy and four other Vermonters on Monday when he broke the news to us.

We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a truth commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor.

Halfway through the allotted 30 minute meeting (with him taking up much of the time explaining why he was not generally opposed to prosecution, since he had been a DA for eight years and had the highest conviction rate in Vermont), he told us that his truth commission had failed to get the broad support it needed in Congress, and since he couldn’t get one Republican to come behind the plan, “it’s not going to happen.”
           
It was a sobering exchange. The meeting had begun with our expressing serious concerns about ongoing dangers to our democracy, with the trend going to executive power while damaging our Constitution.

(The United States is a “nation of laws,” right?  My ass).

According to the New York Times, our amigos in Spain seem interested in things like justice and rule of law:

A Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said. The case, against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others, was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzón, the crusading investigative judge who ordered the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was “highly probable” that the case would go forward and that it could lead to arrest warrants.

According to Scott Horton, at Harper’s, the magistrate presiding over this investigation was the one who brought down Augusto Pinochet.

Update:

CNN reports that the Spanish magistrate has approved the inquiry into Bush-era torture.

The state of New Jersey moves to ban Brazilians from their state.

Our culture has a clear message for Presidents:  as long as you don’t recieve any oral sex, you can feel free to break the law. You will get away with it.  Hey, Ron - the Boland Amendment doesn’t apply to you.  George - don’t worry about that pesky Fourth Amendment, or FISA, either.  This excerpt from a ridiculous Salon column by Joe Conason (supposedly a voice of the left!) shows how far we have gone:

We have a new administration, immured in a world economic crisis, that recognizes conflicting imperatives of accountability and cooperation. And we have a responsibility to explore how the nation embarked on “a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American values,” as Leahy put it.

Is there a way for President Obama to pursue that responsibility without inflicting vengeance or humiliation? Perhaps he ought to consider the creation of a presidential commission whose aims would be purely investigative — and encourage the participation of those implicated in the abuses of the past by promising a complete pardon to anyone who testifies fully, honestly and publicly.

With that gesture, he would acknowledge the importance of uncovering the facts, no matter how ugly, while magnanimously binding up the nation’s wounds. He could leave the issue of criminal prosecution to international authorities that can act without any partisan taint. And he could seek truth without vengeance.

Bullshit, Joe.  Bullshit.

Since when does a republic enforce its most important laws unless it will cause “humiliation?”  Since when is a symbolic “binding up” of our “wounds” more important than the constitution itself?  Since when does the rule of law not matter any more if we’re busy dealing with economic problems?   And, most importantly - since when does holding someone accountable for committing crimes constitute “vengeance?” 

If we continue to allow high-level elected officials to act without any goddamn consequences at all, then we are assured of having more of these same kinds of “wounds” in the future.  Because abuses of power without consequences will not correct themselves magically. 

That a supposedly liberal intellectual like Conason would write a column like this is a sad indication that Dick Cheney’s nefarious plan has worked nicely.  Cheney wanted to create an executive branch with nearly unchecked power, and one whose actions were legal simply by virtue of the fact that they were Presidential.  Yeah. 

The next time a kid from a poor neighborhood in D.C. steals a car and is prosecuted for it, Joe Conason won’t say that the D.A. is seeking “vengeance,” will he?  But the powerful, it appears, are no longer subject to the rule of law.  I guess even liberals now agree.

The evidence is too overwhelming, and it is of far too serious a nature to ignore.  And if we don’t hold our elected officals accountable for their actions, we don’t have rule of law, and we have no international credibility.

From WaPo:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

…

Many of the details of alleged mistreatment at CIA prisons had been reported previously, but the ICRC report is the most authoritative account and the first to use the word “torture” in a legal context.

If you want to bring this up with your senators, click here for their contact information.