You know, these were the losers who were promised money by an FBI informant to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, and despite the fact that they did nothing but try to extract money from the informant, the Jury convicted 5 of the remaining 6 defendants, one had been acquitted in an earlier trial.
I took 3 tries to get a conviction, there were two hung juries, and I still think that this whole case stinks.
Barack Obama promised that the people who engaged in torture at the CIA would not be subject to prosecution, but it appears that this guarantee will not apply to people who actively destroyed evidence of torture:
When president Obama decided to release the Bush-era Justice Department’s interrogation memos last month, he tried to calm an anxious CIA by publicly declaring that operatives who “reasonably” relied on them would not face criminal prosecution. But agency officials still have plenty to worry about. Despite Obama’s assurances, a Justice Department special counsel is quietly ratcheting up his probe into a closely related subject: the CIA’s destruction of hundreds of hours of videotape showing the waterboarding of two high-value Qaeda suspects. At the same time, a Senate panel is planning the first public hearing dealing with CIA interrogations, including testimony from a star witness: Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who vigorously protested the questioning of one of the detainees, terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.
….
You can see my old post on this here.
Interestingly, these tapes were destroyed when both Congressional investigators, and a Federal Court Judge were demanding information of this sort.
While no one may go to jail for the torture, it is likely that some people, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and Jose Rodriguez who was the director of the CIA’s operations directorate.
In a way, this might be better, because their defense against torture is protected by the OLC memos, as flawed (garbage really) as they are, but they did not receive an OLC memo to obstruct justice and destroy evidence.
It looks like the Justice Department’s ethics report on the torture memo authors will not recommend a criminal investigation, but it will recommend disciplinary action by the local bar associations, and this has Bybee, Yoo, and Bradbury are doing the level best to use whatever connections they have to make the report milder.
I do hope that this will bet both of them disbarred, but I think that a criminal investigation is really in order, but these folks are merely the sociopaths (Yoo) and careerists (Bybee and Bradbury) who could be reliably counted on to ignore the law in drafting the memos.
We need to work this up the chain, which will doubtless expose obstruction of justice by higher-ups.
For the good of the country, Cheney and Rumsfeld need to spend the rest of their natural lives in jail, so that people inside the DC Beltway stop thinking that rules do not apply to them.
Some data points:
Indeed, my read of a more recent CQ piece about then DNI John Negroponte also telling Goss not to brief the House leadership about Harman caught on the wiretap is that Negroponte was also trying to shut down what he thought was a rogue effort to pursue investigation of Harman. One now wonders if the reported Negroponte-Goss tensions that ultimately ended in Goss being forced to resign were also fueled by his concerns about Goss’s and the Gosslings’ actions on the Harman matter, and not just the Foggo matter. As we now know, by the way, the Foggo matter is not at all unrelated to the Cunningham case and the HPSCI report that Harman released. Remember: Foggo got the number 3 job at CIA because Goss’s staff recommended him to Goss. Indeed, many members of Goss’s staff had played poker with Foggo and the Cunningham case defense contractors for years (remember the Watergate poker parties?). And my understanding is that when Goss was chairman of HPSCI, Foggo had served his staff as a kind of mole against Tenet and other suspected-unloyal-to-Bush types inside the CIA. So Team Goss and the Gosslings had reasons to squirm when Harman released that report. I need to check when the Foggo indictment actually came down, but I don’t believe he was indicted yet at the time Harman released that report in October 2006. So that case against Foggo and the wider Cunningham investigation still moving may have unnerved people in Goss-land for multiple reasons when Harman released that report.
….
October 2006 is one month before the midterms when the Democrats would retake the House. And with the Democrats expected to win, who would get the chairmanship of HPSCI would have been a live issue for those who cared about these things, including about what kind of oversight even of past actions at CIA might have occurred. Oversight – and in particular Democratic-led oversight – that might have included looking into actions taken during Goss’s tenure as CIA director from 2004-2006. That tenure included, as Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, the CIA’s destruction of videotapes recording harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects — which Harman may have been briefed about. The episode is serious – it’s now the subject of investigation by a special prosecutor. Goss’s tenure also included the whole Foggo corruption matter which was still playing out in 2006, indeed, which played a big role in Goss being forced to suddenly step down as CIA director in May 2006.
So it’s beginning to sound like someone was going after the person most likely to investigate both the torture tape destruction and the connections between Goss staffers and disgraced Congressman Cunningham.
Most of this appears to be moot, because prosecutors are dropping the case against the AIPAC lobbyists, which is a good thing, because the precedent intended by this case was to criminalize the receipt of any classified material by an American citizen without any espionage being involved, and could be very easily extended to journalism.
CBS runs a fantasy football league, and the NFL, and NFLPA were threatening a lawsuit over the ownership of the statistics and player names so CBS got to court first, and won a judgment:
BS Corp.’s Internet unit won the right to use National Football League players’ names and statistics for free in fantasy sports leagues it sponsors after a judge ruled the information is in the public domain.
A federal appeals court decision in 2007 that companies operating fantasy leagues have a First Amendment right to use names and data of baseball players without paying a licensing fee applies to football as well, U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery said in Minneapolis.
This is really basic stuff. You cannot copyright information in the United States, only unique expression or arrangement of that data, such as Westlaw’s citation system for court cases.
The statistics, and the attachment of them to player names, teams, and player numbers, is simply not a unique arrangement or expression of data.
That being said, restrictions of data under an IP regime is the end goal of copyright maximalists, and would make all of society a far poorer place.
This has been reported by NPR, and confirmed by NBC.
It should get interesting.
I would say that if there is a policy of Republicans to follow, it is to appoint younger justices.
If you look at recent appointments, the Republican appointments were in their early 50s (43 for Thomas), and the Dems (Bryer and Ginsberg) were 56 and 60 respectively.
This was a conscious decision, in order to maximize their tenure.
I would also add, wait for Franken to be seated, in order to forestall a filibuster.
Alan Greenspan saying that illegal immigration aids the US economy, because he’s wrong about everything:
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that illegal immigration makes a “significant” contribution to U.S. economic growth by providing a flexible workforce. Greenspan, appearing before a Senate subcommittee today, said illegal immigrants provide a “safety valve” as demand for workers rises and falls.
On a more serious note, look at what he is saying when you tease out the meaning, he is saying that illegal immigration is good because it drives down wages…..That’s what “flexible workforce” and “safety valve,” mean.
Alan Greenspan has always been a big fan of cheap labor.
There is no doubt that illegal immigration adds to GDP. The question is whether it contributes to per capita GDP, or the slightly more nebulous and hard to measure concept of the well being of our society.
½ of Europe’s population died during the heyday of the Black Death, and it is indisputable that the GDP of Europe was lower in the years following the Bubonic Plague outbreak than before.
What is also indisputable is that the standard of living of those remaining rose at the time, as can be seen through records of increased wages, and the frantic passage of (largely ineffective) laws intended to reign in wages and reduce worker mobility.
The end question is not what our immigration policy should be, but rather what should our society look like, and how to we create an immigration policy most consistent with our professed values that creates this society.
To my mind, this is best addressed by extremely aggressive laws targeting employers who deliberately or negligently hire illegals, and not by harsh measures taken against desperate economic refugees.
Now Jay Bybee is actively defending the torture memos that he wrote, as opposed what was said by “friends” to the Washington Post, which is that he basically took the OLC job because he had to in order become a Federal Judge.
I think that the money quote is, “In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”
It’s an attempt to say that it’s reprehensible, but not criminal, and hence does not fall under the the bailiwick of, “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” though that might be small comfort, since the first impeachment and conviction was really because the subject was probably clinically insane, the charges were “drunkenness and unlawful rulings,” and the latter sounds a like Bybee.
So, it looks like the Spanish judges are ignoring the recommendation of the Spanish Attorney General, and proceeding with an investigation.
The best outcome of this investigation, IMNSHO, is that this forces the US government to pursue the perpetrators of these crimes, though the fact that this will tend to prevent Bush and His Evil Minions&trade from traveling freely around the world because of concerns regarding torture is an added plus in any case.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has just told the Obama administration that its assertion of a state secret privilege is full of crap.
Binyam Mohamed, a British national who was rendered, and tortured by the CIA, is to be allowed to pursue his lawsuit against Jeppesen, a private transportation company that flew him to their secret gulags:
The court said the government could ask judges to conduct a case-by-case review of whether the disclosure of specific documents would jeopardize national security. But allowing the executive branch to shut down an entire lawsuit whenever an official says its subject is classified would be a “concentration of unchecked power” and lead to abuses, it said.
“According to the government’s theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the C.I.A. and its partners from the demands and limits of the law,” wrote Judge Michael Daly Hawkins.
I would also note (again) that as a matter of fact, though not of law, that the precedent here, US v. Reynolds, is in fact based on a lie. There were no state secrets involved, the B-29 which crashed was not, as was claimed, on a secret mission or testing secret equipment, as the government implied, but that the the aircraft was in poor condition because of inadequate maintenance.
This is a good decision, and I rather hope that it won’t make it to the Supreme Court, because 4 of those justices will rubber stamp the Bush, and now Obama, policy.
Friends of one of the torture memo authors have been waging a campaign to rehabilitate him by explaining his motives, which is, unfortunately, at the end of the article:
“The whole idea that the Constitution is based on a kind of wariness of mankind’s tendency to grab power, that is an idea I got from Jay,” McAffee said. “So the whole idea of uninhibited executive power, from him, does seem passing strange.”
Bybee’s friends said he never sought the job at the Office of Legal Counsel. The reason he went back to Washington, Guynn said, was to interview with then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales for a slot that would be opening on the 9th Circuit when a judge retired. The opening was not yet there, however, so Gonzales asked, “Would you be willing to take a position at the OLC first?” Guynn said.
Being unable to answer for what followed is “very frustrating,” said Guynn, who spoke to Bybee before agreeing to be interviewed.
Gee, he was a movement conservative who thought he deserved a Federal judgeship, so he authorized torture, even though he knew that it was wrong.
That does not make his circumstances better, it makes them even more indefensible.
He did it because he was a career Apparatchik, not out of any conviction or perceived need.
Bonus video:
John Podesta calls for Bybee’s impeachment.
June first???
That’s eight months after the elections that the Minnesota Supreme Court will begin to hear arguments. It will probably be at least 2 weeks before they issue an opinion.
Jeebus.
He belonged to 2 copyright advocacy organizations that one of the witness headed:
Norstrom is a member of The Swedish Association for Copyright, an organisation whose board includes Peter Danowsky, who represented the music and film industry in the trial, the group said on its website.
Norstrom said he did not believe his memberships had made him ineligible to preside over the trial.
Yeah, sure…..The head of the organization to which you belong is the lawyer litigating in front of you….
In any case, the defense is now asking for a new trial, and they are likely to get it.
He is saying that he will not allow bipartisanship to be used as an excuse to delay an investigation into torture:
Sen. Patrick Leahy pledged today that if he cannot get the votes to create a bipartisan commission to investigate U.S. torture policy under former President George W. Bush — and regardless of calls by President Obama that any inquiry be bipartisan — he’ll conduct his own partisan inquiry in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Leahy’s comments after a press conference on Capitol Hill today exposed a growing rift between Democrats in Congress and the White House on how to seek accountability from Bush-era Justice officials for condoning torture in the aftermath of 9/11.
Leahy is right, and Obama is wrong, morally, legally, and politically.
When you do not prosecute, these people keep coming back, which is why you had so many Watergate and Iran-Contra alums in Bush’s staff and cabinet.
Well, the Senate report on torture is out, and it appears that Rumsfeld and His Evil Minions™ were authorizing torture before the infamous memos justifying such behavior had been drafted, despite the fact that numerous experts on interrogation said that it torture does not work.
Notably, it was based on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training which was used to allow captured Americans to resist torture designed to elicit false confessions.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et all did not care. They just wanted to torture out of a combination of sadism and machismo.
That being said, I do like the last line of the article, “If torture occurred before the memo was written, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on, and the writing of the memo is potentially criminal.”
In a related note, we now know the answer to the question, “Why waterboard someone 183 times in one month?”
They did it for propaganda purposes, specifically, in order to extract false statements linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein”
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Seriously, these people need to spend the rest of their lives in a SUPERMAX facility.
In Arizona v. Gant, by a 5/4 decision, the Supreme Court largely reversed New York v. Belton, which had said that a police officer could search a car when they arrested someone without probable cause.
It was an odd mix of judges too who voted in favor of the 4th amendment, Stevens, Souter,Ginsburg, Scalia(!) and Thomas (!!!).
Basically, the old rule was that if you arrested someone, you could search his car, and now the standard is, “police may search a vehicle without a warrant only when the suspect could reach for a weapon or try to destroy evidence, or when it is ‘reasonable to believe’ there is evidence in the car supporting the crime at hand.”
The other 4, including the 2GW Bush appointees, think that it will be too confusing, but it’s not: If you arrest someone for an expired license, or not seat belting their kids, and they are away from the car, you do not have authority to search it.
This ain’t rocket science.*
*Full Disclosure, in 1999-2000 and 1996-1998, I worked as a mechanical engineer for what is now Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and I have some claim to actually having been a rocket scientist.
It appears that Rahm Emanuel’s and Robert Gibbs statements about not prosecuting people, incensed senior career lawyers at the Department of Justice, who saw this as political meddling in a law enforcement decision.
Interestingly enough, as Scott Horton notes, the net result of this fallout may be to force AG Holder to appoint a special prosecutor in order to defuse those charges, which to my mind is a good thing.
Read the whole editorial, it’s brutal, and calls for a thorough investigation of everyone who conspired on this, and the penultimate ‘graph calls for the Congress to remove Jay Bybee as a federal court judge:
These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.
(emphasis mine)
Somehow, I do not expect Mr. Bybee to go quietly though.
Hopefully, he’ll rat on his fellow conspirators, but I would not expect that either.
I would have expected a bounce in the numbers for this party following the trial; they were in the low single digits before hand, but they seem to be riding a rising wave right now, and might secure a seat in the European Parliament.
I’m not surprised.
I started collecting links on Sunday, and it appears that the the news has developed in a rather interesting manner, with strong statements that there would be no prosecutions, followed by a retreat by the Obama administration following push back from multiple quarters.
On Sunday, we have appearances by administration officials saying that there will be no prosecutions of anyone involved in torture
I asked Emanuel: “The president has ruled out prosecution for CIA officials who believed they were following the law. Does he believe that the officials who devised the policies should be immune from prosecution?”
“He believes that, look, as you saw in that statement he wrote, let’s just take a step back. He came up with this and worked on this for about four weeks. Wrote that statement Wednesday night after he had made his decision and dictated what he wanted to see. And Thursday morning I saw him in the office, he was still editing it. He believes that people in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided,” Emanuel said.
What about those who devised the policy, I asked?
“Yeah, but those who devised the policy, he believes that they were, should not be prosecuted either,” Emanuel said.
“And it’s not the place that we go, and as he said in that letter, and I would really recommend people look at the full statement, not the letter, the statement, and that second paragraph: “This is not a time for retribution. It’s a time for reflection. It’s not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution.’ We have a lot to do to protect America. But what people need to know? This practice and technique, we don’t use anymore. We banned it.”
(emphasis mine)
Then the pressure mounted to not bury everything, and Obama is now saying that investigating the people who crafted the policy is up to the Department of Justice, and Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas reporting that, “Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has discussed naming a senior prosecutor or outside counsel to review whether CIA interrogators exceeded legal boundaries–and whether Bush administration officials broke the law by giving the CIA permission to torture in the first place.
Once again, showing that, when absolutely forced to by the weight of public opinion, the Obama administration can come around on this.
This is a good thing, because whoever was involved in waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, about 6 times a day, was not following even the Orwellian rules of Bush and His Evil Minions™.