Category: Justice

Illegal Political Prosecutionsin Bush DoJ Started in 2001

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This is an impeachable offense, pure and simple:

In the last two weeks, two sources, one of them inside of the Justice Department, have told me that a scheme was hatched in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration shortly after it took office in 2001 or early in 2002. The project identified John Edwards and Hillary Clinton as likely Democratic challengers to President Bush, and identified prominent trial lawyers around the United States as the likely financial vehicle for Edward’s rise. It directed that their campaign finance records be fly-specked, and that offenses not be treated as administrative matters but rather as serious criminal offenses.

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The deliberate use of the state security apparatus to target opponents and their supporters is illegal, and was the sort of circumstance that was specifically envisioned by the founding fathers as a reason for impeachment now.

Braking: FBI Taped Ted Stevens In Anti-Corruption Sting

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Ted Stevens, perhaps the most odious Senator in the history of the body, is going down.

FBI Agents Taped Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens As Part of Corruption Sting

MATT APUZZO
AP News

Sep 20, 2007 19:15 EDT

The FBI, working with an Alaska oil contractor, secretly taped telephone calls with Sen. Ted Stevens as part of a public corruption sting, according to people close to the investigation.

The secret recordings suggest the Justice Department was eyeing Stevens long before June, when the Republican senator first publicly acknowledged he was under scrutiny. At that time, it appeared Stevens was a new focus in a case that had already ensnared several state lawmakers.

More as it comes, but right now, pass the popcorn.

Strange Bedfellows, Schadenfreude Edition

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It should come as no surprise that the ACLU is supporting Senator Craig’s attempt to withdraw his guilty plea.

Additionally, there is a good point made by the ACLU:

Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, argued that police sting operations sometimes trap innocent people. He said police must show that sex was to occur in public, not just that someone was soliciting sex.

“If the police really want to stop people from having sex in public bathrooms, they should put up a sign banning sex in the restroom and send in a uniformed officer to patrol periodically,” Romero said.

Let’s be clear if crude come ons were a crime, the cops would be arresting 20% of the people in your average singles hangout bar.

Is There Some Sort of Fix in on the “Duke” Cunningham Invegation?

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This is weird. Thomas Kontogiannis, who has already admitted to bribing disgraced former Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham was out on bail and money laundering, and as such he was not supposed to leave the country.

It turns out that he did leave the country, he went to a vacation resort in Greece, and the judge was ready to revoke bail and to lock him up, when an assistant U.S. Attorney said at a hearing this morning that the man’s recent trip to Greece was at the direction of federal agents.

This is beyond weird.

I’m wondering if someone in the DoJ wanted to send Kontogiannis a message about not fingering too many Republicans, and thought that they could do so more easily in Greece.

Democratic Suggestion for AG to Replace Gonzalez

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It’s Michael Mukasey.

Considering the names that have been floated by the Bush admin, Ted Olson, and other F%$# yous to the Senate Democrats, it appears that someone must been able to twist his arm over this.

Senator Charles Schumer originally suggested the name, so Bush had to choke to select this guy.

I just can’t think about what they had for leverage to stop him from acting like a petulant child…Unless Senator Larry Craig knows that Bush has a “wide stance” too.

It Should Surprise No one that We Have a Claim of Torture Here

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Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged “20th Hijacker” claims that his admissions were coerced.

He has recanted his confession, and claimed beatings and other torture.

You know the normal stuff for people detained by US forces:

….included being beaten, restrained for long periods in uncomfortable positions, threatened with dogs, exposed to loud music and freezing temperatures and stripped nude in front of female personnel…..

When did the US become a nation of sadistic torturers anyway?

BTW, this treatment is largely confirmed:

The investigation led by Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt confirmed, among other things, that al-Qahtani was forced to wear women’s underwear, was threatened with dogs, and kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. At one point, he was interrogated for 18-20 hours per day on 48 of 54 days.

Schmidt concluded, however, that while the treatment was abusive it was within policy and not torture because he was not denied food, water or medical care, and interrogators did not inflict physical pain on him.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt should spend the next 5-10 years under the confinement of the UN court in the Hague. Those who actually authorized this should be placed in a hole so deep that they never Ever see sunlight again.

“We don’t torture”, my ass. Osama bin Laden has defeated us, and these pukes running Guantanamo and other US Gulags don’t even know that they are his most effective operatives.

Good News on the Civil Liberties Front

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U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero Ruled parts of Patriot Act unconstitutional, specifically the national security letters, which allow the state security apparatus to demand “business data” without a judicial review, and prevent those served from discussing this, even with their lawyers.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act “offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.”

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The law was written “reflects an attempt by Congress and the executive to infringe upon the judiciary’s designated role under the Constitution,” Marrero wrote.

One wonders how long before the Bush dogs come up with another version of these star chamber orders.

Victory for Free Speech and IP Common Sense

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The 10th circuit court of appeals overruled the dismissal of the case Golan v. Gonzalez in the context of works previously in the public domain.

The background is as follows, following the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, the Supreme court ruled that it’s pretty much the exclusive purview of Congress what a “limited time” is under that clause of the Constitution.

However, it also ruled that there could be a 1st amendment challenge if there were an action taken that “altered the traditional contours of copyright protection.”

The Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) brought US intellectual property law in line with that of other countries. In so doing, it removed a number of works from the public domain, and placed them back under copyright, where people who had previously used them found that they had to pay (frequently exorbitant) license fees.

Lawrence Lessig Lessig argued that putting public domain works back under copyright was unprecedented in US law, and hence it significantly altered the “traditional contours of copyright protection”, and overruled the dismissal, remanding the case to the lower court.

This, along with Kahle v. Gonzalez, which argues that the change from opt-in copyright to opt out-copyright alters the “traditional contours of copyright protection”.

My guess is that the current Supreme Court will rule for the rich pigs, but there are a number of people who have reevaluated the role of IP in our society following the Crackberry case.

Bush and His Evil Minions™ Lust for Another Terror Attack

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It used to be that reading the New York Times was not like reading HP Lovecraft.

Now, they make the man who is arguably the greatest horror writer of the 20th century (at least the first half) look like a piker, as in this New York Times magazine article. You should read it for yourself, but here are the high (low?) points in this article about former Bush administration official and major right wing legal scholar Jack Goldsmith, and his new book The Terror Presidency.:

  • That the administration unecessarily took a broad “go it alone” view toward executive power.
  • Legal decisions were not made at DoJ, but by the White House Council (Gonzalez), and the general counsel of the Defense Department.
  • These policies, and the policy making process were so out of line that it honked off John Ashcroft.
  • In response to a fairly straightforward legal opinion, Goldsmith’s assisistant said, “They’re going to be really mad. They’re not going to understand our decision. They’ve never been told no.”
  • In response to this decision, David Addington, then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and now his chief of staff “You cannot question his decision“.
  • Addington later confronted him and said, “If you rule that waythe blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.” (Have I mentioned that these people are really paranoid nuts?)
  • He felt compelled to resign immediately after issuing a more restrictive interrogation policy, “So he made a strategic decision: on the same day that he withdrew the opinion, he submitted his resignation, effectively forcing the administration to choose between accepting his decision and letting him leave quietly, or rejecting it and turning his resignation into a big news story.”
  • Goldsmith recalls that Addington (and Addington does not fart without getting Cheney’s approval) saying, “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court“. They really want another attack.
  • That the badgering of Ashcroft in the hospital was so bad that his wife stuck her tongue at them. (Yes, I know that it sounds mild, but I doubt that she would use profanity if threatened with death)

These folks are completely divorced from reality.

Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald for finding this article.

Google, Yahoo! and Amazon sued over email patent | The Register

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In yet another case of IP gone stupid, patent troll Polaris has sued for infringing their patent on rules based mail filtering.

To quote Ars Technica:

The patent, titled “Automatic message interpretation and routing system,” is unsurprisingly general. It was filed in 1998 and awarded to a company called Brightware, Inc. in 2002, and it basically describes an autoresponder. “The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the step of retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source,” reads the patent.

The company, Polaris IP, has no products. It’s an IP troll.

Note that Procmail, a rather powerful rules based email delivery agent, was released in 1990, and that auto-responders date to before 1980.

Hopefully, this will get thrown out, but if not, one hopes that the court will obey the recent Supreme court precedent, and not grant an injunction.

Our patent system needs to be fixed.

Gonzalez Replacement Will Signal New Biparisan Approach for Bush

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On another bipartisan note, monkeys will be flying out of my butt.

It appears that we have a number of papers (here, and here) suggesting that George Bush will reach across the aisle in a non-partisan spirit.

What the frack are they smoking? Did they see the official announcement? It was angry announcement was angry and petulant. He’ll flip the bird to the congress.

My guess is that it will be Ted Olson, since his wife was killed on 9/11, it allows them to pull out that card.

Of course, there that whole lying under oath thing, where he claimed to not to be close to R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. under oath, the guy who manufactured the Paula Jones crap, despite the fact that he was best man at his wedding.

I won’t bet on that, but I would bet that whatever choice it is, it will be a big $%#@ you to Congress.

Abusive Patent Practices

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Well, it looks like everyone’s favorite patent troll, Rambus is about to get spanked by the EU.

The European Commission has confirmed formal “patent ambush” charges against US memory chip designer Rambus.

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It said that “Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard.”

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The FTC found that Rambus had through subterfuge, illegally gained a monopoly in four key memory technologies.

The gist of all this is that Rambus had an idea, a patentable idea, about how to improve memory performance.

It wasn’t a bad idea, but it wasn’t better than any of the other ideas out there either.

However, when the JEDEC was drawing up standards for the next generation of memory, Rambus, which participated in this board, deliberately, and deceptively kept the information that they had this IP, and that people who signed off on this standard would have to pay them royalties in order to use it.

Had Rambus revealed the status of their IP during the development of this standard, as required by law, the standard would have been drawn up in a way so as not to require their technology.

Personally, I think that people should go RICO on their butts, definately to the extent of putting them out of business, and hopefully to the extent of bankrupting principals in this scheme and sending them to jail.

Good News: The Constitution Applies to Gays Too

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Oklahoma has a lay which forbids recognition of gay adoptions. The federal court of appeals struck down down the law. It violates the U.S. Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, which requires states to honor one another’s judicial judgments, including adoptions.

Good news. The law was mean spirited, Un-American, and probably got the full endorsement of both the Taliban and Al-Queida.