I Hate What You Just Said

Me likey.

“Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

– Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey

Washington Post on Bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan:

Hamdan’s sentence of 5 1/2 years, which amounts to five more months in U.S. custody, was far lighter than some Pentagon officials had expected. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of at least 30 years, and now officials are preparing for the possibility of having to set him free or hold him indefinitely as an “enemy combatant.”

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it has always been the Defense Department’s position that detainees could be held as enemy combatants even after acquittal at military commissions or after serving a prison sentence. “That’s always been on our minds in terms of a scenario we could face,” he said. “He will serve his time for the conviction and then he will still be an enemy combatant, and as an enemy combatant the process for potential transfer or release will apply.”

Wheeeeee! I’m popping open a cold EuroBud in celebration of a really big number.  Ahhh, freedom never tasted so good.

The New York Times and Washington Post present the following set of stomach-churning facts gleaned from investigative journalist, Jane Mayer:

“Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.”

“A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were ‘enemy combatants’ subject to indefinite incarceration.”

“[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees’ cases . . .’There will be no review,’ the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. ‘The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.’”

“[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.”

[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were ‘categorically’ torture, which is illegal under both American and international law”.

“[T]he Red Cross document ‘warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.’”

Constitutional law professor, and former NSA lawyer, Jonathan Turley, throws in his two cents:

Given how corrupt and ineffectual the federal government has been lately, adding yet another government office hardly seems like the solution to our problems.

But this isn’t a bad idea. From Geoffrey R. Stone, in the NYT:

Presidents have a wide range of official advisers. There is a secretary of defense, a secretary of labor, a national security adviser, to name just a few. The next president should create a new executive branch position: a civil liberties adviser. Within the highest councils of every administration there should be a respected public official whose charge it is to defend our civil liberties against all comers.

Ideally, people like the members of congress, the attorney general, and the president should make it their business to protect our civil liberties. You know, because it is sort of their job. But in warrantless-wiretapping, Patriot-Act America, having an official solely dedicated to protecting our constitutional rights might help. After nearly 8 years of the Bush assault on civil liberties, we need all of the help we can get. And let’s just hope that if we do get an official civil liberties adviser position, the appointment will be made by this guy.

* * *

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

-Simone de Beauvoir

Steny Hoyer took some time off from fellating the Bush administration and the legal teams of several of the country’s major telecoms to gratify himself . . . with a goose-stepping interview over at Politico. The subject? What a great job he and the Democrats did on that FISA legislation that just passed the House:

In an interview with Politico on Monday, Hoyer called the FISA legislation a “significant victory” for the Democratic Party — one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens.

Hunter, over at DailyKos responds:

Call me old fashioned, but I’m suspicious about anything “protects” the civil liberties of American citizens by acknowledging that those civil liberties were being violated — then declaring amnesty for those acts. Or by protecting those civil liberties by granting that they can be taken from you using secret evidence, presented secretly, banning review, explicitly banning judicial leeway to determine whether laws were violated, or civil liberties infringed upon, or to determine anything at all but whether the administration said it was OK to do the thing in question. Oh — and that evidence is to be presented by the same people who broke the law in the first place, of course.

Greenwald is in the mix too:

In other words, Democrats achieved a “significant victory” because — by giving Republicans everything they demanded — Republicans are no longer able to criticize Democrats on this issue. What a shrewd strategy: “if we comply with all their demands, then they can’t criticize us for anything.” That’s the Democratic Party’s plan for winning, according to Hoyer.

I wish we had a few more like Chris Dodd in Congress.

Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid rally the Democrats under a new banner:

The Rude Pundit explains how I feel about the Democratic compromise capitulation on the FISA bill.

On Fox News Sunday, our friend Bill Kristol made it clear that John McCain and Lindsey “Huckleberry” Graham will be offering new legislation to Congress this week that will seek to undermine the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush.

It was this decision, of course, that struck a serious blow to the administration’s claim to virtually unlimited powers of arbitrary detention. Kristol remarked:

And I think you will see Senator Graham, accompanied by Senator McCain, come to the floor of the Senate very soon, like next week, and say, We cannot let chaos obtain here. We can’t let 200 different federal district judges on their own whim call this CIA agent here, say, ‘I don’t believe this soldier here who said this guy was doing this,’ you have to release someone,’ or, ‘Let’s build up — let’s compromise sources and methods with a bunch of trials. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Those pesky judges, always dispensing their so-called “justice” whenever their America-hating whimsy kicks in. Just listen to Justice Kennedy, legislating from the bench:

Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to separation of powers.

Unbelievable! We can’t let these evildoers get O.J. style trials here in the US!

I bet, if he had been alive in 1830, justice Kennedy would have ruled in favor of those savage Indians. Thank Christ we had a real, tough-as-hickory American patriot like president Andrew Jackson to give those meddling Supreme Court oligarchs one of those go-up-your-own-ass gestures.

Check out this 18th century hippie, going by the name of Alexander Hamilton:

the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, [has] been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

If they had douchebags in the 18th century, this guy would’ve owned five.

Remember, it was this guy and a bunch of his fist-jabbing terrorist buddies that kept resisting God’s selected leader, King George, during the 18th century. One of the things they were pissed off about was that George kept throwing their fellow natural law extremists into jail without cause or trial. They even had the audacity to write him a strongly-worded letter telling him to stop!

Those assholes just didn’t understand freedom.

You might be forgiven for not having registered the significance of the Irish public’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, viewed by some as the failed 2005 “constitution” of the European Union in drag, last week. Perhaps you saw an article flit by the New York Times website over the weekend before the issue took a backseat to Kobe’s ongoing experiment in athletic eugenics at the NBA Finals or the latest journalist (yes I’m thinking about you Kristol) to elegize the passing of Tim Russert. And damn, wasn’t that a clutch put Tiger sunk to force a playoff?

Meanwhile, somewhere outside Donegal all hell broke loose in European politics. A relatively small European country, Ireland (the only country to put the ratification of the treaty to a referendum so far) is an exemplary case of what is at stake, as the treaty seeks to further centralize key policy positions–such as labor regulations and foreign policy–at the expense of member state autonomy:

The Lisbon treaty is complex. It offers sweeping changes to the way the union runs—creating a new full-time “president” to represent member states, and a foreign-policy chief to speak for Europe round the world. It also sweeps away national vetoes in some important areas of policy, such as cross-border policing and justice. Many Irish no voters voiced suspicions that the treaty would, in reality, rob their small state of clout at the EU’s top tables.

The Economist

“EU leaders were to be heard crowing last year that they had made it “unintelligible” in order to smuggle it past voters,” The Economist continues, rightly noting that this was a much easier task in most European countries, eighteen of which had already shoved it through their respective parliaments with little or no debate.

“So pay no attention to the wailing in Brussels,” writes Anne Appelbaum, “If the most enthusiastic Europeans in Europe didn’t care enough to read the treaty they’ve just rejected, then maybe it’s just as well it didn’t pass.” I guess Applebaum figues that libertarianism European-style means more centralized government and concentrated economic and military power. Apparently, European citizens lack the free-thinking gene possessed by all rational, Cato Institute supporting Americans that allow them to cut through hundreds of pages of bureaucratic doublespeak. But I digress.

Predictably, establishment politicians have been wringing their hands over the result, especially from the larger states, who stood to gain the most. Nicholas Sarkozy, the immigrant-bashing-top-model-marrying-archconservative president of France is especially pissed off. He’s threatening to travel to Ireland to learn firsthand why they had the temerity to say no to even more big business payola and the prospect of increased European military integration. Guess which countries would assume effective control of the latter? Now you’re getting the picture. Stay tuned, France assumes the rotating presidency of the European Union in July.

The right wing freakout over the recent Supreme Court decision to permit habeas petitions for Gitmo detainees reached a skull-splitting crescendo today. Mike “gamecock” DeVine, so-called “Legal Editor” for the site Minority Report, posted the most laughably insane and transparently stupid argument ever crafted with a keyboard.

Today’s infamous 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court granting terrorists the right to an O.J. trial in U.S. civilian courts cries out for the present Chief Executive to so paraphrase Old Hickory’s similar defiance of John Marshall 176 years ago with respect to removal of the Cherokee from Georgia.

“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

The nation survived President Andrew Jackson’s defense of his constitutional executive powers against the first Judicial Oligarch. Should President Bush succumb to Justice Kennedy’s attempted coup to assume the role of Commander in Chief, it will be much harder for our nation to survive, much less thrive, as it has since 1832.

Beyond the fascistic, mindlessly authoritarian vision DeVine articulates for our country, I can only hope that he failed history class. Otherwise, he’s seriously advocating the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears as positive models for presidential behavior. That story is one of the darkest stains on the fabric of American history.

I suppose it’s only fitting that someone use it to justify unlimited, unchecked, and arbitrary executive detention — probably the most un-American and un-democratic thing that I can imagine.