It’s actually a bit more complex. He has introduced two resolutions, one for contempt against Bolton and Miers, and a second one would authorize the House Judiciary Committee to go to court, since Mukasey has said that he won’t enforce a contempt citation.
Nice that Conyers is doing this, but it ain’t gonna hit the floor, because it’s:
NOT ON THE TABLE! NOT ON THE TABLE!
An update on my earlier post on the state secrets privilige.
Well now the Senate Judiciary Committee is working on actual legislation requiring that the Judge be given evidence of an actual proof of a state secret before granting such a motion.
The states secret privilege has been abused for many years, and in fact the original case establishing the privilege, United States v. Reynolds, was an abuse of the privilege, as it was revealed there were no secrets involved.
Because of the laws regarding binding arbitration, details of the pervasive culture of gang-rape at Halliburton operations over seas will never see the light of day.
The Congress has increasingly made easy for companies to institute binding arbitration, and this is the result, rape without consequence.
As is clear from his BBC interview.
According to him, torture is fine to extract information, you just can’t use it in a sentence.
The depressing thing is that a deeply evil man such as this will live his life in luxury and comfort, and never be forced to confront the evil he supports.
5 Muslim students had their convictions for perusing Jihadi websites overturned.
The appeals court declared that, “Difficult questions of interpretation have been raised in this case by the attempt by the prosecution to use [anti-terrorism law] for a purpose for which it was not intended, …. We do not consider that it was made plain to the jury [in the original trial] … that they possessed the extremist material for use in the future to incite the commission of terrorist acts. We doubt whether the evidence supported such a case.”
It’s not in the US, but I’ll take it.
Over at Will Bunch’s Attytood, an interesting point is made:
But the timing of this strikes me as just a little bit too much of a coincidence here. The likely unraveling of Guantanamo is Bush’s worst nightmare. A legitimate criminal trial under American laws of jurisprudence would expose the worst of the Bush-Cheney torture regime, including waterboarding techniques, and have a result that nobody in this debate wants: Making it impossible to gain real justice against the 9/11 planners, because of inadmissable evidence.
A quick trial under military rules, and a speedy execution, is the only long-shot hope for Bush and Cheney for making the worst of the torture nightmare that they’ve created go away. That said, this new push for an execution is likely to rally more opinion around the world — the death penalty has been abolished or is not used in most civilized nations — against the United States; at the risk of appearing cynical, I doubt this decision would be announced if Mitt Romney and his famed “double Guantanamo” move or if Rudy Giuliani were still viable candidates.
But as today’s articles note, it is unlikely, with appeals and the like, that any conviction and death penalty could be carried out as quickly as January. That lays the problem on the lap of the next president — regardless of whether it’s McCain, Clinton or Obama — who would have to either affirm the military tribunals, or else declare on the first day of their presidency that one of their first officials acts will be to overturn a death sentence for a 9/11 mastermind.
These are sick evil bastards, and I’m not referring to the 911 terrorists.
Well, it looks like we’ll have to choose between the folks who poisoned Prince William Sound, and the average American driver, because we have a threat from Chavez to cut off oil shipments over Exxon lawsuit filed in London.
How a company based in the US files suit in the UK, over actions taken in Venezuela is beyond me.
FWIW, Venezuelan oil is not fungible. It’s a “sour” crude, and refineries have to be set up to refine it, so this would be a hole in the world oil supply.
The trials will be under the Any trials would be held by military tribunal under the terms of the Military Commissions Act, which is a mistake.
As representatives of the military say in the case, “Relatively little amounts of evidence will be classified,” and to use unfair and widely ridiculed courts at Guantanamo is a further stain on the reputation of the US.
I believe that Bush’s goals of this is two fold, to help the Republican presidential nominee in the general election, and to attempt to ensnare his successor in the military commissions quagmire, so as to avoid war crimes charges against himself.
These cases are, or should be, a …dare I say it… a “slam dunk, and they can, and should, be conducted in US courts under US rules, not phony courts under Gulag rules.
Well, we now have the White House assurting that waterboarding is legal, simply because they say so, and you have our So-Called Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, saying that if the political hacks appointed by Bush and His Evil Minions™ in the Justice department said that it was OK, then there is no crime, so he will not investigate warrantless wiretapping or torture.
Seriously, these folks really hate most basic founding principal of the Republic, a nation of laws, and not men.
He was 15 years old when arrested, and the US government, and the US military is determined to prosecute Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was apprehended by US forces.
Khadr is charged in the Guantanamo war court with murder, attempted murder, conspiring with al Qaeda, providing material support for terrorism and spying by conducting surveillance of U.S. military convoys in Afghanistan. He faces life in prison if convicted.
Kuebler argued that U.S. and international law assume that children involved in an armed conflict are not there voluntarily, because they lack the experience and judgment to understand the risk of joining armed forces. Defense attorneys contend that any charges against Khadr should be pursued in a civilian court in a juvenile system where the goal is rehabilitation rather than punishment.
This is repugnant beyond belief. It refutes the principles upon which the republic was supposed to be founded, and it makes us less safe, because this war crime, and it is a war crime, inspires other people to become Jihadi.
Basically, this means that George W. Bush cannot invalidate a court ruling through executive order, at least for now.
An appeal is certain.
I’m pretty sure why Alaska now appears to be the most corrupt state in the nation, their petro-economy, and now their sole congressman, Don Young is opening a legal defense fund.
The whole state of Alaska has about the same population as the city of Baltimore, but they make Maryland look like Norway, both in absolute, and per capita, terms.
This is a good decision. The idea that one is allowed to present a number from a black box which no one in the court can fully understand is ludicrous.
Excerpts from the Court of Appeals of Kentucky’s opinion:
A subpoena may be quashed only upon a showing that compliance therewith would be unreasonable or oppressive. We do not believe the commonwealth and CMI have made this showing.The request is not unreasonable because its purpose is to challenge the validity of the breath alcohol readings produced by the Intoxilyzer 5000 instrument, which is anticipated to be used at trial in support of the Commonwealth’s DUI charge against House. The reading was also used to support the aggravating factor of driving with a breath alcohol reading of .18 or more.
Relevant evidence is admissible unless excluded by some other rule. Because a flaw in the computer source code of the Intoxilyzer 5000 would be consequential to the accuracy of the reading intended to be relied upon by the commonwealth, such evidence is relevant and admissible. Accordingly, requesting the computer code to test the verity of the readings produced by the instrument is not unreasonable.
Nope, this is not a punchline. It’s an actual study that they are conducting in the UK.
The university will lead the £1.4m study in which 1,000 males aged 16 to 21 from three young offenders’ institutions in England and Scotland will be randomly allocated either the vitamin-and-mineral supplements or a placebo, and followed over 12 months.
In a pilot study of 231 prisoners by the same researchers, published in 2002, violent incidents while in custody were cut by a more than a third among those given the supplements. Overall, offences recorded by the prison authorities fell by a quarter.
It certainly would explain the relatively high crime in the US.
We have effectively been giving borderline nutrition to the poor, and it shows up in crime statistics, just like Nixon’s removal of lead paint from the market correlates to the crime drop of the 1990s.
One of the dirty secrets of Turkey has been that there have been paramilitary ultra-nationalist hit squads operating with the tacit approval of the Turkish state security apparatus.
Well, 13 have now been arrested by Turkish authorities. My guess is that the new religious leadership in Istanbul, such as Erdogan, see the ultra-nationalists as a personal threat (they are correct), and so they are cracking down.
We have more politically motivated prosecutions, this time of pathologist Cyril Wecht, and that of attorney Geoff Fieger. (I’ve noted to the prosecutions in Mississippi ( here and here) and Don Siegelman before.)
In the case of Wecht:
Prosecutors plan to prove that Wecht used county resources in his private business, defrauded private clients with bogus travel invoices, and submitted falsified mileage receipts to surrounding counties. His attorneys say the charges are either false or amount to minor infractions, such as the improper use of fax machines.
The initial indictment charged 84 counts, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Stallings recently dropped more than half of them to “streamline” the case for the jury. Wecht’s attorneys called the gutted indictment signs of a rush to judgment and shoddy investigating.
In the two years since the indictment, Wecht’s attorneys have attacked prosecutors for alleged political biases, although the judge won’t allow them to argue political motives to the jury.
They have even accused the judge of bias. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied their request for a new judge while chiding Schwab for admitting 300,000 pages of documents into evidence over the objections of the defense.
So we have an intensely sloppy prosecution, over an amounts that are miniscule, they are including misuse of the office fax machine.
And the US Attorney is involved.
With Feiger, best known as Kevorkiann’s lawyer, but also a major Democratic party contributor (shades of Mississippi), you have a number of irregularities:
There will be decades of fallout of the corruption and politicization of the DoJ by Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Daniel Dean Thompson, a man at the heart of the effort to strip out profanity from PG-143 and R rated DVDs, has been arrested for paying 14-year-olds for sexual favors.
Once again confirming that the blue nose brigades are driven by their own personal demons more than anything else.
Judge Richard W. Roberts of the DC court has given the Justice Department 3 weeks to explain how the tape destruction in November 2005 did not violate his July 2005 order not to do so.
In an interview with (who else) Fox News, Bush is saying that it’s no big deal that Osama bin Laden is still breathing free air.
Interesting comment from George W. “Dead or Alive” Bush, don’t you think?
Stephen J. Bradbury wrote the memoranda that authorized torture, and so the Senate has refused to confirm, but George W. Bush, in a fit of pique I guess, has decided that there are not enough war criminals in the Department of Justice, so he’s sending him back again.
If there is a level of lawlessnesses that demands impeachment, it was reached some time ago, and by not addressing this with an investigation, the Congress is ignoring their constitutional responsibility.
NOT ON THE TABLE! NOT ON THE TABLE!