They are investigating whether brokers misled investors on the nature of the securities, which appeared to be sold as being “like a money market account”, but are now illiquid, because the market has frozen up.
Category: Justice
Legal Funnies
It appears that Judge Ronald Leighton was unamused at a 465 page filing in a racketeering lawsuit, including an 8 page title (!), and invoked a rarely used rule requiring short and plain statement of allegations sent it back to be redrafted with the following instructions in limerick form:
Plaintiff has a great deal to say,
But it seems he skipped Rule 8(a).
His Complaint is too long,
Which renders it wrong,
Please rewrite and refile today.
This is why I am not a judge. My limerick would have been far more blunt:
An eight page long title will fail,
regardless of the complexity of the tale,
I hope you don’t mind,
you’re in contempt I do find,
get your toothbrush because you’re going to jail.
Once Again, Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Stun Me Into Sputtering Rage
It seems that it happens every month, and when I say, “That’s it there is no way it could get any worse,” and each time I am wrong.
Now, they are using the Cuba embargo and anti-Terror regulations to prevent the Guantánamo Bay defense attorneys from being paid or reimbursed for expenses.
Note that these guys are billing at $250/hour when their normal rate would be north of $500 an hour, but they aren’t even getting that:
When U.S. law groups announced in April that they were hiring the nation’s top criminal defense lawyers to defend alleged al Qaeda terrorists at the war court here, one executive called the lawyers “The A Team.”
Now, they’re the No-Pay Team.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged arch-terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury Department over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to this remote U.S. Navy base from as far as Boise, Idaho.
….
I can do nothing but look at the screen with an expression on my face resembling that of a cow that just stepped on its own udder.
There’s Not Guilty, There’s Innocent, There Is Pure as the Driven Snow, and Then There is:
Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, former Allegheny County coroner, who was harassed by a political hack US attorney over a few phone calls and faxes from his office.
Note that they did this after said US attorney sent goons to intimidate them after the hung jury (last link).
Canadian Court Orders Review of US Deserter Refugee Status
The judge ruled that officially sanctioned brutality, even when it does not rise to the level of a crime against humanity, is sufficient to merit refugee status:
…..
While the immigration board concluded that some of the alleged conduct by the U.S military included a “disturbing level of brutality,” it said the conduct did not meet the definition of a war crime or a crime against humanity.
Barnes said the board erred “by concluding that refugee protection for military deserters and evaders is only available where the conduct objected to amounts to a war crime, a crime against peace or a crime against humanity.”
Citing a case from the U.S. Federal Court of Appeal, Barnes said officially condoned military misconduct could still support a refugee claim, even if it falls short of a war crime.
“The authorities indicate that military action which systematically degrades, abuses or humiliates either combatants or non-combatants is capable of supporting a refugee claim where that is the proven reason for refusing to serve,” Barnes wrote.
Barnes said the board imposed a legal standard that was “too restrictive” on Key, who lives in Saskatchewan.
Key’s lawyer, Jeffry House, said the ruling expands a soldier’s right to refuse military service.
…..
(emphasis mine)
They broke this man, the story mentions debilitating nightmares, and I’m sure that an examination would find more evidence of damage, and they wanted to send him back.
For us as a society, what should bother us is the broken men who go back to Iraq, and then, one day, they come home, because this will come home with them.
5 Face Manslaughter Charges in Concorde Crash
5 Face trial in Concorde crash that killed 113 in France
A prosecutor said Thursday that Continental Airlines and two of its employees had been ordered to stand trial on involuntary manslaughter charges related to the crash of a Concorde supersonic airliner in 2000 near Paris in which 113 people died.In addition to Continental, the prosecutor also filed involuntary manslaughter charges against two employees of the Concorde program and an employee of the French civil aviation authority.
….
Truth be told, I’m conflicted on the filing of charges. There is an argument to be made that when the criminal justice system is involved,it makes investigations by the safety authorities that much more difficult.
Additionally, I don’t think that the errors here show a callous disregard for human life, which is the standard in the US for manslaughter.
Kafka Lives
U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed the lawsuit by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation claiming that the US government has wiretapped conversations with their lawyers, because the document that confirms this is classified:
A federal judge in San Francisco has dismissed a lawsuit that claimed the government illegally wiretapped conversations between lawyers and a client, a now-defunct charity suspected of terrorism.
The lawsuit relied on a classified call log the government turned over by mistake to the client, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker barred the foundation from using the document and dismissed the suit, according to the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He gave the foundation 30 days to file a new lawsuit using publicly available information.
Catch 22.
Judge: FISA Is Already Exclusive Means of Electronic Surveillance
Well, this ruling shoots a hole in the claim that Dems are getting something from the current FISA clusterf%$#. The Judge says that the original FISA bill is the exclusive means for wiretap.
That being the case, this means that Bush has been violating the law already, and a felony to boot, and that the bill does not change the legal situation.
So the Dems have nothing, except for proof of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Oh, I forgot:
NOT ON THE TABLE! NOT ON THE TABLE!
Thank you Speaker Pelosi for taking impeachment off the table.
Federal Judiciary Ramps Up to Review Guantanamo Habeas
U.S. District Judge James Robertson is looking at the case of Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s driver, and senior Judge Thomas Hogan is managing the proceedings.
I would note that while he was extensively debriefed, Hitler’s driver was never charged with anything, because driving a war criminal is not considered being a war criminal in any fair system of justice.
Wal-Mart Tagged in Labor Case
For shorting workers on the breaks and lunches, and making them work off the clock, to the tune of $6.5 million dollars.
Note that this is just compensatory damages, and that there will be a jury portion to determine punitive damages…And there are about 70 suits just like this one across the USA.
Court Cites Carroll in Uighur Gitmo Case. I would have Cited Kafka
The unclassified portions of decision by the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia regarding Uighur’s imprisoned at Gitmo has now been released. (Background here)
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.
……
Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
……
The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.
(emphasis mine)
When you lose David Sentelle on basic human rights, you are off the track. When David Sentelle signs of on a ruling that quotes Lewis Carroll, you are not only off track, you are off planet.
Keith Olberman Gets Owned by Glenn Greenwald and John Dean
Glenn Greenwald savaged Keith Olbermann because he is endorsing Obama’s sellout as clever politics, when earlier he had one of his vaunted “special comments” denounced telco immunity as textbook Fascism.
Olbermann promptly went on Kos, and called Glenn Greenwald names, and asserted that John Dean said that a President Obama could prosecute the telcos criminally.
There are two problems with this assertion:
- Nothing prevents a Bush pardon on this, and given the language Bush is using on the civil immunity, such a pardon is almost certain.
- John Dean did not say that a President Obama could president the telcos criminally. I saw the interview. What he said was that the had not yet seen anything that would prevent this in the bill.
I said that when I read the bill, and talked to the folks at the ACLU who had been following it, that it was not clear. I raised it when appearing on Countdown with the hope that someone might figure it out. But that is the nature of this badly drafted bill that it is not clear what it does and does not do, and the drafters are not saying.
But even if the bill is unclear there is no question the Bush Administration is not going to do anything to the telecoms, so the question is whether a future DOJ could — and here there is case law protecting the telecoms. But there may be language buried in the bill that protects them as well but it can only be found by reading the bill with a half dozen other laws which I have not yet done.
I made no declarative statements rather I only raised questions that jumped at me when reading the 114 page monster.
(emphasis mine)
For Keith Olbermann to laud Obama’s decision to sell out, and to suggest that Dean supports this action, when on his own show, Dean called telco immunity a, “grave assault on the Constitution”.
It’s not OK when Bush does it, and it’s not OK when Obama goes along with, Mr. Olbermann.
Just Send Out the Congressional the Sergeant of Arms and Lock Him Up
Because if the members of the House Judiciary Committee expect US Attorney General Michael Mukasey to comply with a subpoena regarding documents connected to political scandals*, they have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie©.
You have to vote on the subpoena, but once the deadline passes, have him arrested.
*DoJ foot dragging on the New Hampshire phone jamming, the US Attorney firings, political interference in the Civil Rights Division, etc.
Iran Is an Odd Place
They still enforce a death penalty for homosexuality, but they are one of the most transsexual friendly governments in the world, and now I find that Iran’s policy towards drugs and addiction is geared to a remarkable degree towards treatment, rather than punishment:
In a country where the discussion of some social and cultural issues, like homosexuality, can be all but taboo, drug addiction has been widely acknowledged as a serious problem. It is talked about openly in schools and on television. Posters have encouraged people to think of addiction as a disease and to seek treatment.
Iran’s theocratic government has encouraged and financed a vast expansion in the number of drug treatment centers to help users confront their addictions and to combat the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through shared needles.
…..
Iran’s government, trying to curb addiction’s huge social costs, has been more supportive of drug treatment than any other government in the Islamic world, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
…..
But two decades later, it recognized that this approach had failed. A sharp increase in the crime rate and the number of people infected with HIV, both directly linked to a surge in narcotics use, persuaded the government to shift strategies.
….
…. After a 25 percent surge in HIV cases, the government began distributing free needles in prisons in 2000.
….
“There are so many options that no addict can claim that there is nowhere to go for help,” said Dr. Mohammad-Reza Haddadi, a physician and researcher at the National Center for Addiction Studies. “It is much cheaper and healthier for them to go to these centers for methadone than to drug dealers.”
They realized that a war on drugs wasn’t working, and they changed.
The fact that the Iranians are more sane on drug policy than either mainstream party should be an embarrassment to Americans.
Supreme Court Rules Strikes Down DC Gun Laws
And Scalia wrote the majority opinion, so the guys at SCOTUSBlog were right.
It is still unclear to me where this places other laws.
It appears that the court has kept the door open for some restrictions on gun ownership, such as automatic weapons, felon status, etc.
Is Scalia Writing the Gun Control Legislation Opinion?
That’s the guess of SCOTUSblog, who notes that Scalia has yet to write a majority opinion this session.
I believe that it can safely be said that if Scalia is writing the majority opinion, then all gun control is doomed.
Cheney should shoot Scalia in the face.
About Those Gitmo Detainees “Returning to the Fight”
In the most recent Supreme Court decision on Gitmo, Scalia noted that 30 former detainees had, “Returned to the Fight”.
Well, thanks to Sabin Willett, whose firm has represented some of those detainees, writing in the Boston Globe, we now have a definition of what this means:
It is a serious allegation, so the lawyers looked into it. It turns out that clients of our firm, who were sent to Albania in 2006, were two of the 30. What fight had they returned to? Abu Bakker Qassim had published an op-ed in The New York Times. Adel Abdul Hakim had given an interview. These press statements were deemed hostile by the Department of Defense.
Surely the Pentagon was joking? They weren’t.
So I can’t speak for the other 28, if indeed there are another 28, but for the two men I do know about, giving hostile interviews constituted “returning to the fight.”
The basic institutions of state security in the United States have become very profoundly pathological indeed.
Justice Department’s Felonious Hiring Under Bush and His Evil Minions™
The DoJ inspector general is now reporting that Bush political appointees used political affiliation in their hiring practices.
It started under Ashcroft, and got worse under abu Gonzalez.
Not a surprise.
The question is what to do about it in January of 2009. There needs to be a real house cleaning.
Well, the Courts Finally Recognize That There are Limits
Hazaifa Parhat, a Uighur (pronounced weeger) was declared an “illegal enemy combatant” because the Uighur separatists are occasionally friendly with people who are friendly with al Queida, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that this was insufficient in a unanimous vote.
Note that this was not under the Supreme Court’s habeas corpus ruling. It was under the “Detainee Treatment Act” that the Republithug congress passed in 2006 stripping everyone of habeas corpus rights.
There was no evidence. Not even after Bush and His Evil Minions™ declared them terrorists at the bidding of the Chinese government, and then tortured these guys on behalf of the Chinese Communists.
No evidence. And the only reason to call them “illegal enemy combatants” was because Bush wanted to make nice with the Chinese commies.
The specifics of the non-existent evidence are still not public, as the judgement has to be scrubbed of classified data, but that’s why a bunch of Republithug appointed judges.
Supporting Lawyer-Client Confidentiality
There has been a problem of late, with Federal prosecutors using coercive techniques to make companies waive confidentiality on discussions with lawyers, but there is now Attorney-Client Privilege Protection Act of 2007, which codifies the oft-ignored McNulty Memorandum into law, and so would reduce the leverage that prosecutors might have to make companies waive confidentiality.
I support the change, it’s a basic bedrock principle of our legal system, but it also removes a tool in white collar crime, and we need a whole bunch more CEOs and Wall Street types doing the perp walk, because they are guilty as hell, which does not make me an enthusiastic support of the bill.