Category: Justice

Thabo Mbeki Can Kiss My Shiny Metal Ass

No Comments

Well, it appears that Thabo Mbeki, the friend of brutal genocidal rulers everywhere, is “concerned” about the possibility of crimes against humanity indictments against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, because it might make negotiations more difficult.

Once again, we see that there is no tyrant, no mater how homicidal, that Mbeki does not feel compelled to embrace.

He spent years claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS, and when public pressure required a reversal on that, he decided to create his own, “save the tyrants,” charity.

And the Noose Tightens Around Kurt Weldon

No Comments

You may recall that I wrote about lobbyist friend of former Congressman Curt Weldon Cecelia Grimes, who dumped her Blackberry in the trash at a at an Arbys.

Well, now she has pled guilty on destruction of evidence, and faces as much as 20 years in the slam.

The fact that she has pled out implies some sort of deal, and I think that Kurt, who currently spends his days trying to cut shady deals on Russian military equipment, is going down.

IP Legislation Gone Insane, Chapter LVXXIII

No Comments

Armin Meiwes, who killed and ate a voluntary victim Christmas in 2001, has succeeded in obtaining an injunction against the release of a horror film, because it is based on what he did.

He claimed that the film infringed on his, “Personality Rights”, which in Germany is something in between privacy rights and the “right of publicity” that is used against Elvis impersonators:

The Court looked into the degree to which the pursuit of artistic freedom interfered with the personality rights of Meiwes. It found that artistic freedom was not so powerful a right that it allowed for someone’s life to be made into a horror film.

Meiwes advertised online for someone to be killed and eaten by him. Bernd Jürgen Brandes responded to his advert and tried to join Meiwes in eating his own severed penis before being killed and eaten.

Meiwes was arrested and in 2004 convicted of manslaughter. Prosecutors then changed their case and asked for a retrial in 2005, questioning whether Brandes was in a fit mental state to have given his consent to the killing.

Meiwes was convicted of murder and is serving an eight and a half year jail term. Reports have emerged that in prison he has become a vegetarian.

I guess it’s refreshing to know that the internet doesn’t have a monopoly on really sick sh#@.

Novak’s Hit and Run Victim Still in Hospital

No Comments

It appears that the victim, 86 year old Don Clifford Liljenquist, is in worse shape than previously reported, and is still in the hospital, though this may be complicated by his age and history of homelessness.

All Novak has gotten out of this is a $50 fine.

Considering the reports of witnesses, there should be further investigation…but there won’t be, because Bob Novak is above the law.

The Plame-Wlsons have issued a statement which bears repeating:

Our sympathies go out to the victim of Novak’s action. Once again Novak has demonstrated his callous disregard for the rights of others, as well as his chronic inability to accept responsibility for his actions.

We have long argued that responsible adults should take Novak’s typewriter away. The time has arrived for them to also take away the keys to his Corvette.

Indeed.

3rd U.S. Circurt Court of Appeals Strikes Down COPA

No Comments

They found the law uvague and an infringement on the first amendment and so declared the Child Online Protection Act unconstitutional:

“It is apparent that COPA, like the Communications Decency Act before it, ‘effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another,’ Reno, 521 U.S. at 874, 117 S.Ct. at 2346, and thus is overbroad. For this reason, COPA violates the First Amendment,” the judges wrote. “These burdens would chill protected speech.”

I expect an appeal, but the fact is that the mechanisms are more restrictive, and less effective than filters, and as such appear to be unconstitutional, though IANAL.

So Now We Have the First Murder by Taser

No Comments

Former Police Officer Scott Nugent tasered Baron “Scooter” Pikes NINE TIMES after he WAS ALREADY HANDCUFFED, and may face criminal charges, though I doubt it: It’s Winnfield, Louisiana, only 45 miles from Jena, and the victim was black:

Williams, who ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study, said Nugent fired his Taser at Pikes six times in less than three minutes — shots recorded by a computer chip in the weapon’s handle. Then officers put Pikes in the back of a cruiser and drove him to their police station — where Nugent fired a seventh shot, directly against Pikes’ chest.

“After he was given that drive stun to the chest, he was pulled out of the car onto the concrete, ” Williams told CNN. “He was electroshocked two more times, which two officers noted that he had no neuromuscular response to those last two 50,000-volt electroshocks.”

Williams said he had two nationally known forensic pathologists, including former New York city medical examiner Michael Baden, review the case before issuing his conclusions. He said it’s possible Nugent was shocking a dead man the last two times he pulled the trigger.

“This fellow was talking in the back seat of the car prior to shot number seven,” he said. “From that point on, it becomes questionable [if Pikes was still alive].”

Curry said Pikes told officers he suffered from asthma and had been using PCP and crack cocaine. But Williams said he found no sign of drug use in the autopsy, and no record of asthma in Pikes’ medical history.

In the year since Winnfield police received Tasers, officers have used them 14 times, according to police records — with 12 of the instances involving black suspects. Ten of the 14 incidents involved Nugent, who has no public disciplinary record.

(emphasis mine)

Taser, International is claiming that they couldn’t have caused his death….Yeah, sure….whatever.

Nothing to see here….It’s just a n*****…move along.

Bush Pardons

No Comments

The New York Times buries the lede:

…..some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?

Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.

Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons — whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president’s orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.

“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”

Bush does not pardon out of a compassion, he does not believe in that.

He will pardon for personal and political advantage.

Thus, I expect blanket pardons of his His Evil Minions™, because otherwise, Bush would be in the dock himself.

When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, many in Washington, particularly Republicans came to believe that immunity from lawbreaking was a birthright, and so they have been increasingly brazen in breaking laws.

These people need to spend time in prison. Real ones. Medium security at least.

African Union Pimps for Sudanese War Criminals

No Comments

They are asking for the Security Council to delay any investigation for 12 months.

The official reason is because they believe that an indictment would “harm peace efforts”, but I think that it’s because there are other regimes out there, and I’m not limiting myself to Mugabe, who would be subject to possible prosecution from the International Criminal Court.

It appears that the Darfur rebels understand this too:

Djibril Bassole, the joint U.N.-AU Darfur mediator made his first visit to Sudan on Sunday to try to revive a stalled peace process. But Khalil Ibrahim, head of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said his rebel group would no longer recognise AU efforts to mediate a peace process.

“The African Union is a biased organisation and is protecting dictators and neglecting the African people,” Ibrahim, head of JEM, the most militarily powerful rebel group, told Reuters from Darfur.

Sherif Harir, a senior member of the Sudan Liberation Army Unity faction, also told Reuters that for any AU mediation to succeed, it would have to answer why it had taken such a stance.

“The AU by so doing has indicated to the people of Darfur that they can die and it’s not as important as protecting a president who has taken power by military coup,” he said.

Of course, it’s not like the African Union had much credibility left anyway.

Some Torture Derived Evidence Excluded at Guantanamo Trial

No Comments

The thing that is depressing though is what looks likely to be admitted in the trial, including statements made under the influence of, “sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and sexual humiliation”, because these actions could be seen as, “rationally related to good order and discipline.”

Maybe, if the warders in the prison were members of Stalin’s NKVD. Otherwise, this has nothing to do with “good order and discipline”.

Administration Calls for Congress to Act on Detainees – NYTimes.com

No Comments

Michael Mukasey, George Bush’s new bottom at the department of justice is now saying that allowing Gitmo detainees to actually be physically present in court to contest their detention would constitute an “extraordinary risk”, so Congress needs to act to prevent this.

His proposal:

  • All hearings heard in a single court (no doubt one particularly friendly to Bush and His Evil Minions™).
  • Detainees would remain in Gitmo for the hearings (meaning that they intend to keep the Gulag open).
  • The courts would not be allowed to release the prisoner.
  • The courts would not be allowed to delay trials.

One hopes that the Dems have some backbone on this, but I doubt it.

Shocker: John Ashcroft Not Partisan Enough for Bush and His Evil Minions™

No Comments

And all the while, I though that Ashcroft was one of the Evil Minions™

It turns out that in early 2003, John Ashcroft refused to appoint torture memo author John Yoo to head the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, which had among its roles certifying interrogation techniques as legal, and there was a major blowup on this.

It was eventually settled with a compromise on Jack Goldsmith, who promptly review Yoo’s work and put a big red BS on it.

Hamdan Request for Injunction on Military Show Trial Denied

No Comments

His lawyers are requesting an injunction for two reasons:

  • That they believe that the process is unconstitutional, and wish to challenge the process before a trial (and inevitable guilty verdict).
  • That the Supreme Court has granted detainees the right to challenge their enemy combatant classification, and as such, the trial cannot start until that is adjudicated in federal court.

It should be interesting, because Bush and His Evil Minions™ are desperately trying to get these trials scheduled for maximum impact on the November elections.

And the Judge has decided to allow the trial to proceed on schedule.

Bush Claims Executive Privilege on Documents from a Criminal Investigation

No Comments

It’s the interviews by the FBI with him and Cheney in the Plame Affair, and Bush is insisting that it’s covered by executive privilige, and Mukasey going along with it.

Simply put, enough is enough. Find Mukasey in contempt, and have the sergeant at arms of the Congress throw his ass in th t cell in the basement of Congress.

While you are at it, get Miers and Bolton in a cell.

Court: “Because I Said So” Not Due Process

No Comments

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri a legal US resident who was arrested for credit card fraud, and then declared an “enemy combatant” will now have his day in court, after more than 5 years in solitary confinement.

The court ruled that he could be detained, but that the basis of the detention, the statement of a defense department official without supporting evidence, was insufficient to justify his classification.

Note that as a legal resident, he has the same rights to due process as a US citizen, and so the Bush administration’s position was thus that they were free to detain anyone at any time forever without any supporting facts.

Personally, I think that if they have evidence, it should be addressed in a real trial, though I would be not at all surprised if this hearing reveals that the emperor has no clothes.

International Committee of the Red Cross Reported Torture by US Forces

No Comments

Well, it turns out that the ICRC specifically warned members of the military and the Bush administration that they were engaging in war crimes:

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, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the 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.

….Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

I really hope that there is a prosecutor in The Hague getting his ducks in a row over this case now.