With 21 ‘Phants voting against, largely, it appears, because the report in the Moonie Times saying that he would not prosecute torture was in error, and he actually has refused to rule out prosecutions.
Category: Justice
The Minnesota Election Trial Continues to be the Norm Coleman Clown Show
Well, we just had another example of one of Coleman’s hand picked witnesses saying something that they shouldn’t, though this time, it was under cross, as opposed to direct, examination.
Peter DeMuth admitted that the Coleman challenge team cherry picked him, even though they have maintained that there has been no such activity:
Upon cross-examination by Franken attorney Kevin Hamilton, DeMuth said he was contacted by the Republican Party and told about the problem. “They asked me if I knew my absentee ballot had been rejected. I said no,” said DeMuth. “They asked me if I was a supporter of Norm Coleman, and I said yes, and they proceeded to ask me if I would like to go further.”
Let’s think about this for a moment: Over the last several days, the Coleman camp has said repeatedly that they are not cherry-picking who they’re helping out, that they don’t know who the people they’re advocating for actually supported, and for all they know they’re helping out Franken-voters.
This is becoming really pathetic.
I’m not sure why Norm Coleman and His Evil Minions&trade are doing this…My best guess, based on nothing, is that they figure that they will have a donation list that they can use in the future that is, as Rod Blagojevich would say, is “Bleeping Golden.”
Rod Blagojevich Convicted By State Senate
So he has been removed from office, and Pat Quinn, the Lt. Governor, assumes his powers.
Good. Not only do we have cloture, but I don’t have to struggle with spelling “Blagojevich” any more.
Speaking of Insubordination
The presiding judge at Gitmo, Army Colonel James Pohl, is refusing to suspend one of the trials, and has scheduled the arraignment for February 9:
Hours after taking office last week, Obama ordered Guantanamo prosecutors to seek 120-day delays in all pending cases to give his administration time to decide whether to scrap the widely criticized tribunals created by the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists outside the regular U.S. court system.
But the judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, said the law underpinning the tribunals gives the presiding judges sole authority to delay cases. He ruled that postponing proceedings against Abd al Rahim al Nashiri would harm the public interest in a speedy trial.
Note that al Nashiri appears to be one of the “high value” defendants who was water boarded, and he has been held for over 5 years…so much for speedy trials.
Seriously, Bush and His Evil Minions™ did their level best to politicize every level of government, including the military.
This will be poisoning the military and the civilian bureaucracy for decades to come.
White House Denies Non-Prosecution Promise
An unnamed Holder aide is denying that he made any promise not to prosecute torture:
Eric Holder has not made any commitments about who would or would not be prosecuted. He explained his position to Senator Bond as he did in the public hearing and in his responses to written questions.
So it appears that Kit Bond’s statements to the Washington Times are now in dispute.
I really think that Eric Holder and Barack Obama both need to publicly disavow the news report.
Judiciary Committee Votes to Approve Eric Holder
The vote was 17-2.
Full Senate approval as Attorney General looks to be a cinch.
Conyers Subpoenas Rove
This should get interesting, because we likely have an Attorney General, or will shortly, who might actually enforce a Congressional subpoena.
My guess as to the end game is that he will show up and then refuse to answer questions, but Rove sees himself as the smartest guy in the room, and if he talks, he’ll lie.
If he lies, that’s a federal crime.
Election Update
It’s the first day of the Minnesota Election trial, and the Judges just threw out Coleman’s evidence, and told him to submit originals, rather than certified copies, because their copies of ballot envelopers were discovered to have been altered.
Good way to piss of the judges.
No Files?
So, in their eagerness to torture people, it appears that Bush and His Evil Minions™ never bother to assemble files on the Guantanamo detainees, which makes an evaluation, much less a fair trial of the detainees.
As Hilzoy notes, “It takes, well, a special kind of administration to detain people for years on end without bothering to assemble case files on them. I’m just glad they’re finally gone.”(emphasis original)
Notwithstanding Bush’s insistence that the military commissions were the only way to try these folks, this makes it clear that they never wanted trials, just torture.
How bad was it? Here are the last two ‘graphs of the WaPo article:
In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was “strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks.”
He said he once accidentally found “crucial physical evidence” that “had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten.”
This is not a serious attempt at competent prosecution or trial.
Obama Opposes Cram-Down in Stimulus
Dumb move. With mortgages sliced and diced amongst dozens, if not hundreds, of investors, you cannot renegotiate terms in many cases, which means more defaults and foreclosures.
He’s not opposed to allowing bankruptcy judges to rewrite mortgages, he just does not want it in the bailout package.
That’s because he’s still pursuing the asinine goal of getting 80 votes in the senate.
He won’t get 80 votes for a bill that works, because Republicans cannot afford fiscal stimulus to succeed.
Israel’s Supreme Court Revokes Party Ban
No surprise. It’s happened before, and now Supreme Court has again revoked a ban of Arab parties by a Knesset committee.
Everyone who voted to the ban the party knew that this would happen, but they also saw political benefit in doing so, because some of the more prominent Israeli Arab politicians are viewed as assholes.
My previous post on this was called, “Stupid and Damaging Electioneering,” and I stand by that.
This is kind of the polar opposite of Dukkakis and the pledge of allegiance in the 1988 campaign. He vetoed the bill, even though he knew it would be unpopular, because he knew that it was unconstitutional.
Israeli politics sucks.
UN Rapporteur Says Obama Bound by International Law to Prosecute
Courtesy of the ever reliable Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)
In an interview on Tuesday evening with the German television program “Frontal 21,” on channel ZDF Professor Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Rapporteur responsible for torture, stated that with George W. Bush’s head of state immunity now terminated, the new government of Barack Obama was obligated by international law to commence a criminal investigation into Bush’s torture practices.
“The evidence is sitting on the table,” he stated. “There is no avoiding the fact that this was torture.” He pointed to the U.S. undertakings under the Convention Against Torture in which the country committed that it would criminally prosecute anyone who tortured, or extradite the person to a state that would prosecute him. “The government of the United States is required to take all necessary steps to bring George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld before a court,” Nowak said.
I wanna see them in the Hague, because I think that you will have too many people willing to be a mole in the jury in the US.
Figure 20%+ dead-enders, that’s two per jury, and, because it’s going to be a long and complex trial, people who aren’t die hard Bush supporters won’t want to sit on the jury.
A Good Start
Obama has ordered a halt to the implementation of the Bush last-minute regulations pending a review and he has suspended the Gitmo kangaroo courts pending a review.
National Archives to Get Boxes of Poo from Dick Cheney
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has ruled that Dick Cheney has the power to decide which of his papers are transferred to the national archives:
The Justice Department provided what U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called “constantly shifting arguments” in the case, but, she said, “That confusion is not evidence” that would undermine the sworn deposition of Claire M. O’Donnell, a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping and other administrative tasks.
“The Court expects,” she said, that White House officials “will, in good faith, comply with the representations that their officials have made, by way of testimony, in this case.” As a result, she granted summary judgment on the White House’s behalf and lifted a five-month-old injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney’s records.
And I’m Jamie Lee Curtis.
One of the plaintiffs, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said he remains worried that “when the Archives goes to open Cheney’s papers, they are going to find empty boxes.”
Nope, they want some weight there, and an empty box is not his style. My guess is that Cheney threw out his back squatting over his document boxes and taking a dump in them.
Because Cheney is not leaving without a hearty f#@k you to everyone.
This Should Get Interesting
It appears that now that Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are on their way out, judges are getting rather a bit more aggressive, or maybe the wheels of justice are just grinding slowly, and have caught up with reality, because Judge HenryKennedy Jr. of the US District Court for DC has just told the White House to turn over all computer storage devices in their possession, and to open up their PCs to forensic investigation, in order to support lawsuits involving the Iraq War and the Valeria Plame outing.
The judge wants all the emails.
What’s more, it appears that someone was actually looking for them, because Helen Hong, a lawyer for the DoJ civil division just said that they have found the backup tapes with the emails in question.
It’s always the tapes, isn’t it.
Pass the popcorn.
What the Shrill One Says
Krugman nails it. Promising to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the US means more than the president follow the laws.
It means that he should aggressively prosecute those who conspire to violate the Constitution.
There were very real crimes committed, and not little ones, and they were knowingly entered into.
Coleman (Mostly) Loses on Timeline for Challenge
Coleman was proposing something like 5 mini trials extending over something like 8 weeks, and the Minnesota Election Court has gone with something more expedited.
The trial will start Jan 26, assuming that Franken’s motion to dismiss is not accepted on the 21st.
Length is indeterminate. A strict 15 day limit on the trial, which Franken wanted, was about the only time that they went with Coleman, so there is no hard deadline.
Election Update
I have no clue as to what Norm Coleman and His Evil Minions&trade are trying, but the schedule his proposed to the judges who have been assigned to his challenge mean that it would be at least 6 weeks before they finish.
That seems to me to be a good way to piss off said judges.
If he actually thought that he really won, I would imaging that he would be trying to move this along quickly.
I have no clue as to what is going on, except that perhaps Republicans are paying him a lot of money to keep this up so that Franken does not vote in the Senate.
Senior Bush DoJ Official Called Perjurer by IG
The Department of Justice’s report on Bradley Schlozman is absolutely scathing, saying that he:
- Illegally applied political standards to career attorney hirings.
- Lied about it to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But 2 weeks before the new administration, no charges will be filed.
So, we have a flat out statement that he committed perjury, you know the things that the Republicans went Jihad over with Bill Clinton when it was: (a) Arguable, depending on your definition of sex, and (b) Not related to his official duties.
Even so, because Bush and His Evil Minions™ have thoroughly polluted the Justice Department, so the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has declined to prosecute him.
If anyone out there lives in Kansas, how about filing a complaint with the disciplinary authorities there, because that is where he is practicing law. (more contact information at the link)
1 in 5 Union Organizers Gets Fired
So says Dean Baker, and I am surprised that the number is that low, with Bush and His Evil Minions™ running the NLRB.
It’s also illegal as hell.
Card check now.