New US commander in Afghanistan assembles team of assassins
By Bill Van Auken
Confirmed Wednesday as President Barack Obama’s new commander for the widening war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Stanley McChrystal has been given extraordinary powers to assemble his own staff.
According to press reports published Thursday, in forming a permanent war council-dubbed the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell-McChrystal is drawing heavily from a super-secret assassination squad that he commanded under the Bush administration.
That unit, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was formed in December 1980 in the wake of the military’s abortive operation to free US hostages in Iran. Comprised of the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEALs, the command directs Special Mission Units that carry out classified operations, often in collaboration with CIA squads.
Commanded by McChrystal between 2003 and 2008, JSOC has been linked to assassinations in over a dozen countries as well as abduction and torture. Under the Bush administration, it was reportedly used to carry out covert operations inside Iran, which included the abduction and assassination of officials suspected of aiding Iraqi militia groups.
Earlier this year, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who is writing a book on the subject, termed the command “an executive assassination wing.” He said that it was tasked with “going into countries...finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.” Hersh added that, under the Bush administration, the unit reported to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.
According to the New York Times, McChrystal “has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans.” The newspaper attributed the “extraordinary leeway” granted to the general to the Obama administration’s concern over the war, which over the past year has registered the highest levels of violence since the US invasion of the country in October 2001 and has seen the Taliban and other insurgent elements gain control over much of the country.
Citing Pentagon figures, McClatchy News reported, “The first five months of this year have seen a 59 percent increase in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, a 62 percent increase in coalition deaths and a 64 percent increase in the use of improvised explosives compared to the same period last year.”
Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the sudden ouster of Gen. David McKiernan and his replacement by McChrystal, a move that reflected increasing desperation in Washington. The shakeup followed the findings of a Pentagon task force headed by McChrystal in May that reported in relation to Afghanistan that the “security situation in key areas is poor, stalemated or deteriorating.”
Tapped to serve as McChrystal’s deputy and assigned to oversee day-to-day operations in Afghanistan is Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was chosen last year by Defense Secretary Gates as his personal military assistant. Rodriguez is reportedly a longtime friend and protégé of McChrystal.
McChrystal has selected Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn as his intelligence advisor for Afghanistan, the Times reported. Flynn, who is currently director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, had previously served as McChrystal’s intelligence chief in the shadowy operations of JSOC.
Chosen as commander of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell is the longtime special operations officer Gen. Scott Miller, who as a captain commanded Delta Force troops in the US military’s “Blackhawk Down” debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the so-called coordination cell is “modeled on a system Gen. McChrystal put in place in Iraq, when he commanded the Navy Seals and other Special Operations personnel.”
The units that he commanded in Iraq are reported to have carried out an assassination program in that country aimed at eliminating suspected leaders of Iraqi insurgent groups hostile to the US occupation. Personnel under his command also ran a detention and interrogation center near the Baghdad airport known as Camp Nama, where prisoners were subjected to systematic abuse amounting to torture. The motto of the unit running the camp was “No Blood, No Foul,” meaning that any form of abuse that did not draw blood was acceptable and would not result in investigations or prosecution. Soldiers assigned to the facility have reported that McChrystal was a regular visitor.
Given this background, it is noteworthy that the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee subjected McChrystal to no serious or sustained questioning during his confirmation hearing last week. The committee’s chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, disposed of the torture issue at the outset by helping McChrystal to lay the blame on then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and on orders from Washington.
The right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal gloated over the Democrats’ failure to make an issue out of torture, writing on June 4 that it assumed this was the case “because General McChrystal happens to have been nominated by President Obama, not President Bush.”
In the end, the only obstacle placed in the way of McChrystal’s nomination was general procedural foot-dragging by the Republicans.
To break the logjam, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went to the Senate floor Wednesday and made a dramatic announcement that he had received a telephone call from Adm. Mike Mullen. The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman had told him, Reid said, that McChrystal had to fly to Afghanistan that very night and was “literally waiting by an airplane,” because there was no commander on the ground in Afghanistan.
“Let’s get the man approved tonight so he can go,” Reid said. Senate Republicans responded by moving to confirm McChrystal and two other military nominees.
Media coverage of McChrystal’s confirmation and the changes in war strategy surrounding the creation of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell has centered on innocuous suggestions that the planned rotation of this core group of 400 between the war in Afghanistan and Afghanistan-related planning in Washington would allow these personnel to “accumulate expertise.”
McChrystal’s military career and those of the chief officers he is selecting as his aides, however, suggest that what is being prepared is a dramatic escalation of the killing in Afghanistan, through the utilization of the type of methods employed during Operation Phoenix in Vietnam or the death squad killings during the US intervention in El Salvador.
Speaking to reporters during a flight to a NATO meeting in Brussels, Defense Secretary Gates reiterated the repeated warnings from senior military officials that, as the US continues to build up its forces in Afghanistan to a target of nearly 70,000 troops by the end of the year, the bloodshed will grow accordingly.
“We've been very upfront about the fact that as we send in more troops, and go into areas that have not had an Afghan government or ISAF International Security Assistance Force presence yet, that there will be more combat and the result of that will be more casualties,” Gates said.
In its escalation of the US war in Afghanistan, and its increasing extension across the border into Pakistan, the Obama administration has chosen as its senior commander an officer who is among those most deeply implicated in the criminal operations carried out under Bush and Cheney. This appointment, and its confirmation by the Democratic-controlled Senate, is a clear warning that the ruling establishment in Washington is pursuing a consensus policy that will involve even greater war crimes against the Afghan people, as Washington continues its attempt to assert hegemony in Central Asia by military means.
Original article posted here.
Showing posts with label Legal disgrace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Legal disgrace. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2009
Obama to use all means in his power to stop torture photos from being released and gives $100 Billion to IMF
Abuse Photos Part of Agreement on Military Spending
By CARL HULSE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON — Congressional negotiators reached tentative agreement on Thursday on a $105.9 billion spending measure that would provide money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September but would drop a ban on the release of photographs showing abuse of foreign prisoners held by United States forces.
The deal was concluded after Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, went to the Capitol to assure Senate Democrats that President Obama would use all administrative and legal means to prevent the photos’ release. At the same time, a federal court issued a ruling effectively ensuring that the photos would not be released for months, if ever.
Mr. Obama followed up with a letter, promising to work with Congress if legislation was necessary to keep the photos from being publicized but urging lawmakers not to let the dispute interfere with freeing up the money for the armed forces.
“Given the singular importance of providing funding for our troops, it is essential that Congress pass the supplemental appropriations bill,” Mr. Obama wrote in the letter, which was read publicly at the negotiating session by Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii and the Appropriations Committee chairman.
The photo restriction, approved by the Senate, was viewed by some Democratic House members as an end run around federal freedom of information laws. It was dropped to appease Democrats already uneasy about approving nearly $80 billion for combat and more money for aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Democrats said they could not secure enough votes to pass the bill if the photo ban were included. But Republicans threatened to try to block the measure if the ban were cut out, saying the photos could incite terrorists and endanger Americans overseas.
“What good are we to our soldiers if we can’t protect them in a time like this?” asked Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “Every photo is a bullet for our enemy.”
He and his allies, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said Mr. Obama should take executive action to block the release of the photos by ordering them classified.
The administration’s cause was bolstered when a federal appeals court in New York announced last Thursday that it had granted a request by the Obama administration and recalled its April 27 order to release the photographs, permitting the administration to take the case to the Supreme Court.
In effect, the decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit means it will be months before there is any chance that the Defense Department could be ordered to release the photographs.
Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is seeking the release of the photographs as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, said she was disappointed by the court’s ruling. “It will only serve to delay further the release of these photographs, which are critical for informing the ongoing public debate about the treatment of prisoners,” she said.
Ms. Singh said the photos portrayed abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq in places other than Abu Ghraib prison, the Iraq jail made infamous in 2004 by photographs of abuse there, and would therefore show that abuse was “not aberrational but systemic.”
The photo issue is just one of several that are likely to generate opposition to the bill, which would also set aside $7.7 billion to prepare for a flu pandemic, provide $1 billion to encourage consumers to trade in older cars for more fuel-efficient models and allow detainees at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, center to be brought to the United States for trial.
The measure also clears the way for a $100 billion line of credit for the International Monetary Fund, which was the initial source of trouble for the spending bill. Republicans strongly supported the spending legislation when it was considered this year, but have threatened to withhold their support over the foreign aid, saying some of the money could go to unfriendly governments.
With Republicans abandoning the measure, Democrats need as many votes as they can win over and the ban on releasing the photos emerged as a major obstacle. In the meeting of House and Senate negotiators late Thursday afternoon, efforts to reinstate the ban were beaten back.
Some lawmakers also questioned including $1 billion to encourage owners of older cars to trade them in for more fuel-efficient models. That program, known as Cash for Clunkers, is nominally aimed at helping the environment and reducing carbon emissions, but many lawmakers who pushed for it were primarily interested in lifting vehicle sales to prop up the struggling auto industry.
The provision had not originally been included by either the House or Senate. And critics, mainly Republicans but also some Democrats, charged that it was a brazen giveaway of tax dollars to bankrupt auto companies that had already received billions in federal bailout assistance. But an effort to eliminate the money was defeated.
The bill also includes $8 million to pay for a new commission to examine the causes of the financial and economic crisis.
Scott Shane contributed reporting.
Original article posted here.
By CARL HULSE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON — Congressional negotiators reached tentative agreement on Thursday on a $105.9 billion spending measure that would provide money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September but would drop a ban on the release of photographs showing abuse of foreign prisoners held by United States forces.
The deal was concluded after Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, went to the Capitol to assure Senate Democrats that President Obama would use all administrative and legal means to prevent the photos’ release. At the same time, a federal court issued a ruling effectively ensuring that the photos would not be released for months, if ever.
Mr. Obama followed up with a letter, promising to work with Congress if legislation was necessary to keep the photos from being publicized but urging lawmakers not to let the dispute interfere with freeing up the money for the armed forces.
“Given the singular importance of providing funding for our troops, it is essential that Congress pass the supplemental appropriations bill,” Mr. Obama wrote in the letter, which was read publicly at the negotiating session by Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii and the Appropriations Committee chairman.
The photo restriction, approved by the Senate, was viewed by some Democratic House members as an end run around federal freedom of information laws. It was dropped to appease Democrats already uneasy about approving nearly $80 billion for combat and more money for aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Democrats said they could not secure enough votes to pass the bill if the photo ban were included. But Republicans threatened to try to block the measure if the ban were cut out, saying the photos could incite terrorists and endanger Americans overseas.
“What good are we to our soldiers if we can’t protect them in a time like this?” asked Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “Every photo is a bullet for our enemy.”
He and his allies, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said Mr. Obama should take executive action to block the release of the photos by ordering them classified.
The administration’s cause was bolstered when a federal appeals court in New York announced last Thursday that it had granted a request by the Obama administration and recalled its April 27 order to release the photographs, permitting the administration to take the case to the Supreme Court.
In effect, the decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit means it will be months before there is any chance that the Defense Department could be ordered to release the photographs.
Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is seeking the release of the photographs as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, said she was disappointed by the court’s ruling. “It will only serve to delay further the release of these photographs, which are critical for informing the ongoing public debate about the treatment of prisoners,” she said.
Ms. Singh said the photos portrayed abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq in places other than Abu Ghraib prison, the Iraq jail made infamous in 2004 by photographs of abuse there, and would therefore show that abuse was “not aberrational but systemic.”
The photo issue is just one of several that are likely to generate opposition to the bill, which would also set aside $7.7 billion to prepare for a flu pandemic, provide $1 billion to encourage consumers to trade in older cars for more fuel-efficient models and allow detainees at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, center to be brought to the United States for trial.
The measure also clears the way for a $100 billion line of credit for the International Monetary Fund, which was the initial source of trouble for the spending bill. Republicans strongly supported the spending legislation when it was considered this year, but have threatened to withhold their support over the foreign aid, saying some of the money could go to unfriendly governments.
With Republicans abandoning the measure, Democrats need as many votes as they can win over and the ban on releasing the photos emerged as a major obstacle. In the meeting of House and Senate negotiators late Thursday afternoon, efforts to reinstate the ban were beaten back.
Some lawmakers also questioned including $1 billion to encourage owners of older cars to trade them in for more fuel-efficient models. That program, known as Cash for Clunkers, is nominally aimed at helping the environment and reducing carbon emissions, but many lawmakers who pushed for it were primarily interested in lifting vehicle sales to prop up the struggling auto industry.
The provision had not originally been included by either the House or Senate. And critics, mainly Republicans but also some Democrats, charged that it was a brazen giveaway of tax dollars to bankrupt auto companies that had already received billions in federal bailout assistance. But an effort to eliminate the money was defeated.
The bill also includes $8 million to pay for a new commission to examine the causes of the financial and economic crisis.
Scott Shane contributed reporting.
Original article posted here.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
When a title says it all . . .
| Do You Feel Safe Now? Proud? |
| by Paul Craig Roberts |
| Now that military officers selected by the Bush Pentagon have reached a split verdict convicting Salim Hamdan, a onetime driver for Osama bin Laden, of supporting terrorism, but innocent of terrorist conspiracy, do you feel safe? Or are we superpower Americans still at risk until we capture bin Laden's dentist, barber, and the person who installed the carpet in his living room? The Bush regime with its comic huffings and puffings is unaware that it has made itself the laughingstock of the world, a comedy version of the Third Reich. Hamdan was not defended by the slick lawyers that got O.J. Simpson off, and he most certainly did not have a jury of his peers. Hamdan was defended by a Pentagon-appointed U.S. Navy officer, and his jurors were all Pentagon-appointed U.S. military officers with an eye on their careers. Even in this kangaroo court, Hamdan was cleared of the main charge. The U.S. Navy officer who was Hamdan's appointed attorney is certainly no terrorist sympathizer. Yet even this United States officer said that the rules Bush designed for the military tribunals were designed to achieve convictions. He also said that the judge allowed evidence that would not have been admitted by any civilian or military U.S. court. He said that the interrogations of Hamdan, which comprised the basis of the Bush regime's case, were tainted by coercive tactics, including sleep deprivation and solitary confinement. Does this make you a proud American? Do you think you are made more safe when you stand there while "your" government implements its own version of Joseph Stalin's show trials? The trial and conviction of Hamdan has made every American very unsafe. The one certain fact about U.S. law is that it is expanded until it applies to everyone. Consider RICO, for example, the asset freeze law that was intended only in criminal cases involving the Mafia; it wasn't long before RICO found its way into civil divorce proceedings. Bush's multi-year, multi-billion dollar "war on terror" has been reduced to railroading a low-level employee, a driver, for "terrorism." One would hope that the Hamdan verdict would be enough shame and ridicule for the U.S. in one day. But no, Bush didn't stop there. On his way to the Beijing Olympics, President Bush expressed "deep concerns" for the state of human rights in China. But not in Guantanamo, nor in Abu Ghraib, nor in the CIA's torture dungeons used for "renditions," nor in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. is expert at bombing weddings, funerals, children's soccer games, and every assortment of civilians imaginable. As the good book says, clean the beam from your own eye before pointing to the mote in your brother's eye. But Americans, the salt of the earth, have neither beams nor motes. We are the virtuous few, ordained by God to impose our hegemony on the world. It is written, or so say the neocons. What would President Bush say if, heaven forbid, the Chinese were as rude as he is and asked Mr. Superpower why the land of "freedom and democracy" has one million names on a watch list. China with a population four times as large doesn't have a watch list with one million names. What would President Bush say if China asked him why the U.S., with a population one-fourth the size of China's, has hundreds of thousands more of its citizens in prison? The percentage of Americans in prison is far higher than in China and is a larger absolute number. What would President Bush say if China asked him why he used lies and deception to justify his invasion of Iraq. China, unlike Bush, is not responsible for 1.2 million dead Iraqis and 4 million displaced Iraqis. China's human rights policy is not perfect. China's greatest human rights failing is that China is the Bush regime's prime enabler of its war crimes and human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. By financing Bush's budget deficit, China is financing Bush's gratuitous wars. Indeed, China can be said to finance the weaponry that the U.S. gives Israel to enable the suppression of the Palestinians and with which to bomb the civilian population of Lebanon. China is a serious human rights abuser, because China is complicit in Bush's human rights abuses. If we are honest about who is actually murdering and abusing people, it is the U.S., Israel, and the UK. There's your "axis of evil." Original article posted here. |
Monday, July 28, 2008
Non stop criminality. Non stop partisanship. Non stop fascism. (Only members of The Party can work here. Move on.)
Gonzales Aides Broke Laws in Hiring, Report Concludes
Senior aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales broke the law by using politics to guide their hiring decisions for a wide range of important department positions, slowing the hiring process at critical times and damaging the department’s credibility and independence, an internal report concluded Monday.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
Monica Goodling, a former Justice Department official, testified before Congress in May 2007 at the height of the scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys.
Back Story With Eric Lichtblau (The report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general and its internal ethics office, singles out for particular criticism Monica Goodling, a young lawyer from the Republican National Committee who rose quickly through the ranks of the department to become a top aide to Mr. Gonzales.
Ms. Goodling, who testified before Congress in May 2007 at the height of the scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys, introduced politics into the hiring process in a systematic way that constituted illegal misconduct, the report found.
Last month, the inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, released a separate report that found a similar pattern of politicized hiring at the Justice Department in reviewing applications from young lawyers for the honors and intern programs. The new report released Monday goes much further, however, in documenting pervasive evidence of political hiring for some of the department’s most senior career, apolitical positions, including immigration judges and assistant United States attorneys.
The inspector general’s investigation found that Ms. Goodling and a handful of other senior aides to Mr. Gonzales developed a system of using in-person interviews and Internet searches to screen out candidates who might be too liberal and to identify candidates seen as pro-Republican and supportive of President Bush.
When interviewed by the inspector general, Mr. Gonzales said he was not aware that Ms. Goodling and other aides were using political criteria in their decisions for career positions. Mr. Gonzales resigned last summer in the face of mounting accusations from congressional Democrats that politics had corrupted the department.
His successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, said in a statement Monday after the report’s release that he was disturbed by their findings that improper political considerations were used in hiring decisions relating to some career employees.
“I have said many times, both to members of the public and to Department employees, it is neither permissible nor acceptable to consider political affiliations in the hiring of career Department employees,” he said. “And I have acted, and will continue to act, to ensure that my words are translated into reality so that the conduct described in this report does not occur again at the Department.”
He said that over the course of the last year and a half, the Justice Department has made institutional changes to remedy the problems discussed in today’s report.
“It is crucial that the American people have confidence in the propriety of what we do and how we do it,” he said, “and I will continue my efforts to make certain they can have such confidence.”
An attorney for Ms. Goodling, John Dowd, did not return a phone message Monday.
In her position as White House liaison for the Justice Department, Ms. Goodling was involved in hiring lawyers for both political appointments and non-political, career positions. Regardless of the type of position, the report said, Ms. Goodling would run through the same batch of questions, asking candidates about their political philosophies, why they wanted to serve President Bush, and who, aside from Mr. Bush, they admired as public servants. Sometimes, Ms. Goodling would ask: “Why are you a Republican?”
Such questioning was allowed for candidates to political appointments, but was clearly banned under both civil service law and the Justice Department’s own internal policies, the inspector general said. Ms. Goodling’s questioning also generated complaints from one senior official who believed it was improper, long before the issue became a public controversy following the firings of nine United States attorneys. The inspector general concluded that Ms. Goodling knew that questioning applicants to career positions about their political beliefs was improper.
In one case, for instance, Ms. Goodling slowed the hiring of a prosecutor in the United States attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for a vacancy because she said she was concerned that he was a “liberal Democrat.” After the United States attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, complained to her supervisors, he was allowed to hire the candidate anyway.
And in another case, colleagues said that Ms. Goodling refused to extend the appointment of a female prosecutor because she believed the lawyer was involved in a lesbian relationship with her supervisor, according to the report.
And in another case cited by the inspector general, Ms. Goodling blocked the hiring of an experienced prosecutor for a senior counter-terrorism position because his wife was active in Democratic politics. The candidate was regarded as “head and shoulders above the other candidates” in the view of officials in the executive office of United States attorneys, but they were forced to take a candidate with much less experience because he was deemed acceptable to Ms. Goodling.
In forwarding a résumé in 2006 from a lawyer who was working for the Federalist Society, Ms. Goodling sent an e-mail message to the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, saying: “Am attaching a résumé for a young, conservative female lawyer.”
Ms. Goodling interviewed the woman herself for possible positions and wrote in her notes such phrases as “pro-God in public life,” and “pro-marriage, anti-civil union.” She was eventually hired as a career prosecutor.
Ms. Goodling also conducted extensive searches on the Internet to glean the political or ideological leanings of candidates for career positions, the report found. She and other Justice Department supervisors would look for key phrases like “abortion,” “homosexual,” “guns,” or “Florida re-count” to get information on a candidate’s political leanings.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
The judiciary committee hearings on impeachment
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) brought about today’s Judiciary Cmte. hearing on the executive power and the Bush Admin. The hearing is partly based on a single article of impeachment he brought against Pres. Bush, and on alleged misconduct and unlawful expansion of executive power.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
A hint of that this criminal operation might pull . . .
Pre-emptive Presidential PardonsCan you be pardoned for a crime before you're ever charged?
By Jacob Leibenluft
Explainer thanks Ken Gormley of Duquesne Law School, Harold Krent of the Chicago-Kent School of Law, and P.S. Ruckman Jr. of Rock Valley College and PardonPower.com.
Original article posted here.
By Jacob Leibenluft
With six months to go before President Bush leaves office, the White House is receiving a flurry of pardon applications. The New York Times reported that "several members of the conservative legal community" are pushing for the White House to grant pre-emptive pardons for officials involved in counterterrorism programs. Wait—can a president really pardon someone who hasn't even been charged with a crime?
Yep. In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Garland that the pardon power "extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment." (In that case, a former Confederate senator successfully petitioned the court to uphold a pardon that prevented him from being disbarred.) Generally speaking, once an act has been committed, the president can issue a pardon at any time—regardless of whether charges have even been filed.
As the Explainer has pointed out before, there aren't many limits to the president's pardon power, at least when it comes to criminal prosecutions under federal law. The president's clemency power has its origins in the practices of the English monarchy, and as a result, the Supreme Court has given the president wide leeway under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. There are some exceptions: The chief executive can't pardon someone for a violation of state law or nullify a civil ruling, and his power doesn't extend to convictions handed down in an impeachment proceeding. (It's also not clear whether the president can pardon himself for future convictions.
While pre-emptive pardons remain very rare, there are a few notable exceptions. Perhaps the most famous presidential pardon of all time occurred before any charges were filed. Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon absolved the former president of "all offenses against the United States which he … has committed or may have committed or taken part in" between the date of his inauguration in 1969 and his resignation in August 1974. In other cases, presidents have pardoned individuals after criminal proceedings have begun but before a judgment has been handed down. In late 1992, less than a month before leaving office, President George H.W. Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who had been indicted earlier that year on perjury charges surrounding the Iran-Contra affair. (A lawyer for Roger Clemens' former trainer Brian McNamee claimed the pitcher might receive a similar pardon from Bush if he were ever indicted.) In addition, broad presidential amnesties—like the one President Carter issued to those who had avoided the draft during the Vietnam War—are essentially pre-emptive pardons issued to a large group of individuals.
If someone hasn't yet been charged with a crime, how does the president know what to pardon them for? As in Nixon's case, President Bush could issue a pardon that applies generally to any crimes that may have been committed within a certain range of dates. More likely, a pardon could apply only to actions surrounding a single policy or place—say, the detention or interrogation of suspected al-Qaida members.
Explainer thanks Ken Gormley of Duquesne Law School, Harold Krent of the Chicago-Kent School of Law, and P.S. Ruckman Jr. of Rock Valley College and PardonPower.com.
Original article posted here.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Rights? Wrong!
| July 21, 2008 Court Confirms President's Dictatorial Powers |
| by Andy Worthington |
| Wake up, America! On July 15, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by 5 votes to 4 in the case of Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli [.pdf] that the president can arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents inside the United States and imprison them indefinitely, without charge or trial, based solely on his assertion that they are "enemy combatants." Have a little think about it, and you'll see that the Fourth Circuit judges have just endorsed dictatorial powers. In the words of Judge William B. Traxler, whose swing vote confirmed the court's otherwise divided ruling, "the Constitution generally affords all persons detained by the government the right to be charged and tried in a criminal proceeding for suspected wrongdoing, and it prohibits the government from subjecting individuals arrested inside the United States to military detention unless they fall within certain narrow exceptions…. The detention of enemy combatants during military hostilities, however, is such an exception. If properly designated an enemy combatant pursuant to legal authority of the president, such persons may be detained without charge or criminal proceedings for the duration of the relevant hostilities." As was pointed out by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, who was steadfastly opposed to the majority verdict (and whose opinion was endorsed by Judges M. Blane Michael, Robert B. King, and Roger L. Gregory), "the duration of the relevant hostilities" is a disturbingly open-ended prospect. After citing the 2007 State of the Union Address, in which the president claimed that "The war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others,'" Judge Motz noted, "Unlike detention for the duration of a traditional armed conflict between nations, detention for the length of a 'war on terror' has no bounds." The Court of Appeals made its extraordinary ruling in relation to a habeas corpus claim in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, whose story I reported at length here. To recap briefly, Marri, a Qatari national who had studied in Peoria, Ill., in 1991, returned to the United States in September 2001, with his U.S. residency in order, to pursue post-graduate studies, bringing his family – his wife and five children – with him. Three months later he was arrested and charged with fraud and making false statements to the FBI, but in June 2003, a month before he was due to stand trial for these charges in a federal court, the prosecution dropped the charges and informed the court that he was to be held as an "enemy combatant" instead. He was then moved to a naval brig in Charleston, S.C., where he has now been held for five years and one month in complete isolation in a blacked-out cell in an otherwise unoccupied cell block. For the first 14 months of this imprisonment, when he received no visitors from outside the U.S. military or the security agencies, he was subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperature manipulation, frequently deprived of food and water, and interrogated repeatedly. In August 2003, representatives of the International Red Cross were finally allowed to visit Marri, and two months later he was permitted to meet with a lawyer, when he finally had the opportunity to explain that his interrogators had "threatened to send [him] to Egypt or to Saudi Arabia where, they told him, he would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him." Based on advice given to Donald Rumsfeld by Defense Department lawyers regarding the use of isolation at Guantánamo, when the lawyers warned that it was "not known to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days," Marri has now been held in solitary confinement for 66 times longer than the amount of time recommended by the Pentagon's own lawyers (this figure includes the six months that he spent in isolation in Peoria County Jail and the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, before being transferred to Charleston). It is, therefore, unsurprising that his lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, has explained that he is suffering from "severe damage to his mental and emotional well-being, including hypersensitivity to external stimuli, manic behavior, difficulty concentrating and thinking, obsessional thinking, difficulties with impulse control, difficulty sleeping, difficulty keeping track of time, and agitation." So what is Ali al-Marri supposed to have done to justify being held in solitary confinement for almost as long as the duration of the Second World War? The presidential order declaring him an "enemy combatant" stated simply that he was closely associated with al-Qaeda and presented "a continuing, present, and grave danger to the national security of the United States." Elaborating, in subsequent statements, the government has claimed that he was part of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, who had been instructed to carry out further terrorist attacks in the United States, targeting reservoirs, the New York Stock Exchange, and military academies. What's particularly worrying about these charges is that, by the government's own admission, the primary sources for its supposed evidence against Marri are confessions made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, during the three months following his capture in March 2003, when, as even the CIA has admitted, he was subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, which the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition at least had the honesty to call tortura del aqua. As I discussed at length in an article last summer, KSM stated during his tribunal at Guantánamo in March 2007 that he had given false information about other people while being tortured, and, although he was not allowed to elaborate, I traced several possible victims of these false confessions, including Majid Khan, one of 13 supposedly "high-value" detainees transferred with KSM to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006; Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman and philanthropist held in Guantánamo; and his son Uzair, who was convicted in the United States on dubious charges in November 2005 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. As I also stated last November, "It's possible, therefore, that Marri is another victim of KSM's tangled web of tortured confessions, but whether or not this is true, the correct venue for such discussions is in a court of law, and not in leaks and proclamations from an administration that appears to be intent on holding him without charge or trial for the rest of his life." When I wrote these words, it seemed possible that the Fourth Circuit judges would act to prevent Marri from having the dubious distinction of being the last "enemy combatant" on the U.S. mainland, and would put pressure on the government to transfer him to a federal prison to face a trial in a U.S. court, as happened with Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen and one of two other "enemy combatants" imprisoned without charge or trial – the other being Yaser Hamdi, a U.S.-born Saudi, who was held in Guantánamo until it was ascertained that he held U.S. citizenship. In Hamdi's case, however, a brief stay at the Charleston brig was followed by a deal that allowed him to return to Saudi Arabia. In June 2007, a panel of three Fourth Circuit judges dealt a blow to the administration's claims by ruling that "the Constitution does not allow the president to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them 'enemy combatants.'" Last week's decision followed a successful appeal by the government, but when the Fourth Circuit court met en banc to reconsider Marri's case in October, it seemed possible that they would uphold the panel's June verdict. When Judge Michael asked the government's representative, Gregory J. Barre, "How long can you keep this man in custody?" and Garre replied that it could "go on for a long time," depending on the duration of the "war" with al-Qaeda, Judge Michael stated, "It looks like a lifetime." I now realize, of course, that it was always highly improbable that the Fourth Circuit court – widely regarded as the most right-wing court in the country – would end Marri's legal limbo, although it was somewhat ironic that, in a separate ruling, the swing-voting Judge Traxler ruled in Marri's favor when it came to a decision to grant him some as yet unspecified ability to challenge the basis of his definition as an "enemy combatant." This, at least, earned him the gratitude of Judge Motz, who stated that "the evidentiary proceedings envisaged by Judge Traxler will at least place the burden on the government to make an initial showing that 'the normal due process protections available to all within this country' are impractical or unduly burdensome in Marri's case and that the hearsay declaration that constitutes the government's only evidence against Marri is 'the most reliable available evidence' supporting the government's allegations." In other respects, however, the court only added to its reputation as a defender of the indefensible. Not content with endorsing the president's dictatorial right to imprison "enemy combatants" without charge or trial on the U.S. mainland, the judges responsible for the majority verdict ruled that the president did not even have to allege, as he did with Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, that an "enemy combatant" had either been in Afghanistan or had ever raised arms against U.S. forces. The injustice of this was pointed out in the opinion of Judge Motz, who stated that, "unlike Hamdi and Padilla, Marri is not alleged to have been part of a Taliban unit, not alleged to have stood alongside the Taliban or the armed forces of any other enemy nation, not alleged to have been on the battlefield during the war in Afghanistan, not alleged to have even been in Afghanistan during the armed conflict, and not alleged to have engaged in combat with United States forces anywhere in the world." Judge Motz added, however, "With regret, we recognize that this view does not command a majority of the court. Our colleagues hold that the president can order the military to seize from his home and indefinitely detain anyone – including an American citizen – even though he has never affiliated with an enemy nation, fought alongside any nation's armed forces, or borne arms against the United States anywhere in the world. We cannot agree that in a broad and general statute, Congress silently authorized a detention power that so vastly exceeds all traditional bounds. No existing law permits this extraordinary exercise of executive power." Disturbingly, as Judge Motz mentioned above, the court also indicated its presumption that its ruling applies not just to legal residents like Marri, but to U.S. citizens as well. Judge Traxler noted, "it is likely that the constitutional rights our court determines exist, or do not exist, for Marri will apply equally to our own citizens under like circumstances," and Judge Motz explained that the lack of distinction between citizens and residents had become apparent at oral argument, when the government "finally acknowledged that an alien legally resident in the United States, like Marri, has the same Fifth Amendment due process rights as an American citizen. For this reason, the government had to concede that if Marri can be detained as an enemy combatant, then the government can also detain any American citizen on the same showing and through the same process." We have, to be honest, been here before. In September 2005, a three-member panel upheld, in Padilla's case, the president's power to hold U.S. citizens indefinitely without charge or trial [.pdf]. This verdict was never tested, as the government took Padilla out of the brig and into the court system (where he was convicted in January) before the Supreme Court could rule on his case, but as Glenn Greenwald noted in an article at Salon.com, the upshot is that the 2005 Padilla verdict still stands. To that extent, all that has changed now is that the Fourth Circuit court has reinforced its former ruling en banc. Marri's lawyers will doubtless appeal, and, if justice still counts for anything, his case will go all the way to the Supreme Court. However, it remains incomprehensible to me that the whole sorry saga has lasted for so long already. As Jonathan Hafetz and his colleagues explained last November when they presented their arguments to the Fourth Circuit judges (and as Judge Motz noted last week), the president "lacks the legal authority to designate and detain al-Marri as an 'enemy combatant' for two principal reasons": firstly, because the Constitution "prohibits the military imprisonment of civilians arrested in the United States and outside an active battlefield," and secondly, because, although a district court previously held that the president was authorized to detain Marri under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the September 2001 law authorizing the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those involved in any way with the 9/11 attacks), Congress explicitly prohibited "the indefinite detention without charge of suspected alien terrorists in the United States" in the PATRIOT Act, which followed five weeks later. That seems pretty clear to me. In the "War on Terror," however, as I have learned during my research over the last two and a half years, all forms of logical thought – sometimes in the courts, most of the time in military custody, and as a permanent fixture in the war rooms where torture was endorsed – have been engulfed in a fog of fear and barbarism. I leave the final words to Judge Motz, and her clear-eyed awareness of the injustice of the Marri verdict. "To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the president call them 'enemy combatants,' would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution – and the country," Judge Motz wrote. "For a court to uphold a claim to such extraordinary power would do more than render lifeless the Suspension Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the rights to criminal process in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments; it would effectively undermine all of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It is that power – were a court to recognize it – that could lead all our laws 'to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces.' We refuse to recognize a claim to power that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic." Unless Ali al-Marri is allowed a meaningful review of his status as an "enemy combatant," Judge Motz's fears have already come true. |
Saturday, July 19, 2008
On the subject of legal charades: just where did the 4th Amendement go?
U.S. Is Alone in Rejecting All Evidence if Police Err
Original article posted here.
Bradley Harrison was driving a rented Dodge Durango from Vancouver to Toronto in the fall of 2004 with 77 pounds of cocaine in the trunk when a police officer pulled him over, found the drugs and arrested him.
A year and a half later, an Ontario trial judge ruled that the officer’s conduct was a “brazen and flagrant” violation of Mr. Harrison’s rights. The officer’s explanation for stopping and searching Mr. Harrison — confusion about a license plate — was contrived and defied credibility, the judge said, and the search “was certainly not reasonable.”
In the United States, that would have been good news for Mr. Harrison. Under the American legal system’s exclusionary rule, the evidence against Mr. Harrison would have been suppressed as the result of an unlawful search.
But both the Canadian trial judge and an appeals court refused to exclude the evidence. Mr. Harrison was sentenced to five years in prison.
“Without minimizing the seriousness of the police officer’s conduct or in any way condoning it,” the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in Mr. Harrison’s case in February, “the exclusion of 77 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of several millions of dollars and the potential to cause serious grief and misery to many, would bring the administration of justice into greater disrepute than would its admission.” The case is now before the Canadian Supreme Court.
The United States is the only country to take the position that some police misconduct must automatically result in the suppression of physical evidence. The rule applies whether the misconduct is slight or serious, and without regard to the gravity of the crime or the power of the evidence.
“Foreign countries have flatly rejected our approach,” said Craig M. Bradley, an expert in comparative criminal law at Indiana University. “In every other country, it’s up to the trial judge to decide whether police misconduct has risen to the level of requiring the exclusion of evidence.”
But there are signs that some justices on the United States Supreme Court may be ready to reconsider the American version of the exclusionary rule. Writing for the majority two years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia said that at least some unconstitutional conduct ought not require “resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt.”
The court will soon have an opportunity to clarify matters. The justices will hear arguments on Oct. 7 about whether methamphetamines and a gun belonging to Bennie Dean Herring, of Brundidge, Ala., should be suppressed because the officers who conducted the search mistakenly believed he was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant as a result of careless record-keeping by another police department.
Elsewhere in the world, courts have rejected what the Ontario appeals court in Mr. Harrison’s case called “the automatic exclusionary rule familiar to American Bill of Rights jurisprudence.”
Australia also uses a balancing test. It considers the seriousness of the police misconduct, whether superiors approved or tolerated it, the gravity of the crime and the power of the evidence. “Any unfairness to the particular accused” in most cases, the High Court of Australia wrote in 1995, “will be of no more than peripheral importance.”
The European Court of Human Rights, a notably liberal institution, refused in 2000 to require the suppression of illegally obtained evidence. Using such evidence to convict a man charged with importing heroin into England, the court said, did not make his trial unfair.
In the United States, by contrast, evidence against criminal defendants is routinely and automatically suppressed when police misconduct is found. In the last week of June, for instance, courts in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington state suppressed evidence in cases involving drugs, guns, burglary and child pornography under the mandatory version of the exclusionary rule.
Some specialists in comparative criminal law say that the decentralized nature of American law enforcement, with thousands of local police departments around the nation, requires a more rigorous and consistent approach to deterring misconduct. The law enforcement systems in Canada and England, by contrast, are notably less fragmented and may be subject to more stringent professional discipline.
But not always. The officer who pulled over Mr. Harrison’s car in Ontario thought the car should have had a front license plate, even though the car was from Alberta, which does not require one. “We respect the decision of the courts,” said Sgt. Pierre Chamberland, a spokesman for the Ontario Provincial Police, but “their criticism alone does not by default lead to an internal complaint.”
Supporters of the American practice say that only strict application of the exclusionary rule can effectively address violations of the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches and seizures.
“The exclusionary rule deters police misconduct in a straightforward and effective way,” said a supporting brief filed by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in the case the Supreme Court will hear in October. “It reduces the value of evidence obtained as a result of Fourth Amendment violations, and thus eliminates what would otherwise be a powerful incentive for police to engage in such violations.”
Several justices have in recent years questioned whether the rule still makes sense in light of what they called the increased professionalism of the police and the availability of alternative and arguably more direct ways to punish misconduct, including internal discipline and civil suits.
Opponents of the rule say it is indirect, incomplete and in a way perverse. Even if it deters unlawful searches, exclusion of evidence, for instance, offers no remedy to innocent people whose rights were violated by unlawful searches.
More important, as Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in 1954, the exclusionary rule “deprives society of its remedy against one lawbreaker because he has been pursued by another.” Or, in Judge Benjamin Cardozo’s famous mocking formulation in a 1926 decision for New York’s highest court rejecting the rule: “The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered.”
That reasoning continues to resonate with some experts.
“Lots of scholars argue that the mandatory exclusionary rule ought to be re-examined,” said David A. Sklansky, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Those scholars are not all on the right of the political spectrum.” Professor Sklansky said he believed that the rule’s benefits continued to outweigh its costs.
Most specialists continue to support the rule, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “The U.S. experience is a consequence of history,” Professor Kerr said. “It’s a response to the police not following the law in the absence of this remedy.”
The idea that exclusion is the proper response to police misconduct is of relatively recent vintage.
“Supporters of the exclusionary rule cannot point to a single major statement from the Founding — or even the antebellum or Reconstruction eras — supporting Fourth Amendment exclusion of evidence in a criminal trial,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, wrote in The Harvard Law Review in 1994.
According to Professor Amar, the framers of the Fourth Amendment assumed that the right it guaranteed would be enforced through civil lawsuits, not exclusion. “Both before and after the Revolution,” he wrote, “the civil trespass action tried to a jury flourished as the obvious remedy against haughty customs officers, tax collectors, constables, marshals and the like.”
These days, law professors and defense lawyers say, civil suits are less likely to be effective. Criminals whose rights have been violated are not attractive plaintiffs, and they may not have the resources to litigate, particularly from behind bars. Civil suits must, moreover, overcome various legal doctrines limiting the liability of police officers and their employers.
The Supreme Court started requiring the exclusion of improperly obtained evidence in 1914 — but only in federal cases.
For many decades afterward, the Supreme Court refused to apply the principle to states, saying they could choose the appropriate remedy for police misconduct — including civil suits and criminal prosecutions — and were not required to suppress evidence. In a 1949 decision, the court justified that position in part with a rationale now disfavored in some circles: a survey of foreign law.
“Of 10 jurisdictions within the United Kingdom and the British commonwealth of nations,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote for the majority, “none has held evidence obtained by illegal search and seizure inadmissible.” The right to be free of arbitrary police intrusion is fundamental, Justice Frankfurter wrote, but the legal remedy for the violation of that right can vary.
It was not until 1961 that the Warren Court, in one of its signature decisions, concluded in Mapp v. Ohio that only the mandatory suppression of evidence could adequately address wrongdoing by the police in all cases, state and federal.
Seven Cleveland police officers had broken into and searched Dollree Mapp’s home without producing a warrant, manhandling her and rummaging through her personal papers. Though the Ohio Supreme Court concluded that the search had been unlawful, it affirmed Ms. Mapp’s conviction on obscenity charges based on materials the police found in her home.
That was too much for a majority of the Supreme Court to stomach. “The state, by admitting evidence unlawfully seized, serves to encourage disobedience to the federal Constitution which it is bound to uphold,” Justice Tom C. Clark wrote for the court. Only the exclusion of evidence could do the job, he said; other remedies had proved “worthless and futile.”
The Supreme Court has in recent years whittled away at the exclusionary rule by limiting its applicability and creating exceptions to it. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Scalia, neither of whom is enamored with citing foreign law, each noted in recent decisions that the American approach in this area is unique and has been universally rejected elsewhere.
In a third decision two years ago, Hudson v. Michigan, Justice Scalia seemed to say that the exclusionary rule had outlived its original purpose. The case involved a conceded violation of a rule requiring police executing a search warrant to knock and announce themselves.
Much had changed since the exclusionary rule was applied to states in 1961, Justice Scalia wrote. Police departments had become more professional, he said, and various kinds of civil suits against officials and the government had become available. “As far as we know,” Justice Scalia wrote for the court, “civil liability is an effective deterrent.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the four dissenters, said that exclusion remains the best and most reliable deterrent. He added that the logic of the majority’s objections was not limited to “knock and announce” violations but was “an argument against the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary principle itself.”
Original article posted here.
Bush Election Fraud: Trying to pierce the wall of criminality in a time of fascism and the disintergration of the rule of law
Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
Leading Data Security Expert Joins Press Conference, Case, Notes Fraudulent Patterns That Should Have Triggered Investigation
Motion to Proceed with Targeted Discovery in Case Explained as Effort to Help Protect Integrity of '08 Election...
-- Special to The BRAD BLOG by Steve Heller of Velvet Revolution
At a press conference this morning in Columbus, Ohio, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case of King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, announced that he is filing a motion to "lift the stay in the case [and] proceed with targeted discovery in order to help protect the integrity of the 2008 election."
"We anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."
Arnebeck will also "be providing copies of document hold notices to the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform and the U.S. Justice Department for Karl Rove emails from the White House."
This case has the potential to put some of the most powerful people in the country in jail, according to Arnebeck, as he was joined by a well-respected, life-long Republican computer security expert who charged that the red flags seen during Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election would have been cause for "a fraud investigation in a bank, but it doesn't when it comes to our vote."
"This entire system is being programmed in secret by programmers who have no oversight by anybody," the expert charged, as Arnebeck detailed allegations of complicity by a number of powerful GOP operatives and companies who had unique access both to the election results as reported in 2004, as well as to U.S. House and Senate computer networks even today.
The presser was attended by some of the corporate-controlled media, including the head of the Ohio AP bureau, the Columbus Dispatch, and IndyMedia. Listening in by phone were ABC News, our friends from RAW STORY, and I, your humble blogger. I recorded the presser, so I have no links for the quotes in this post, but I transcribed them word-for-word and can vouch for their accuracy.
One of the more delightful and interesting quotes comes from Arnebeck, concerning what he expects to discover as the stay is lifted: "[W]e anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."
According to Arnebeck, his expert witness, Stephen Spoonamore, "works for credit card companies chasing data thieves, identity thieves around the globe, and also consults with government agencies including the Secret Service, the Pentagon, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in criminal matters. [He's] really one of the top, and in fact the top private cop in the world on the subject of data security."
First, some background. The King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case was filed on August 31, 2006. At issue was "whether the rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed to Plaintiffs by the Civil Rights Act, and the First, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been violated by the past and ongoing conduct of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in connection with past elections in Ohio."
A stay was previously entered into on joint motion of the parties, Ohio's Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and the plaintiffs, to support settlement discussions in the case. "At one point," Arnebeck noted this morning, "this was interrupted when the Secretary wanted to bring all the ballots that had been ordered preserved by Judge Marbley, bring them in to one location. When the ballots came in, there was significant omissions and reports of the destruction of some of the ballots."
The BRAD BLOG reported previously on some of some of the ballots missing from 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, despite the federal court order.
Arnebeck explained that part of the reason for the stay, at the time, was to allow the Ohio Attorney General to proceed first, as provided in Ohio House Bill 3 which states, in part:
...the attorney general may initiate criminal proceedings for election fraud under section 3599.42 of the Revised Code which results from a violation of any provision of Title XXXV of the Revised Code, other than Chapter 3517. of the Revised Code, involving voting, an initiative or referendum petition process, or the conducting of an election, by presenting evidence of criminal violations in question to the prosecuting attorney of any county in which the violations may be prosecuted. If the prosecuting attorney does not prosecute the violations within a reasonable time or requests the attorney general to do so, the attorney general may proceed with the prosecution of the violations with all of the rights, privileges, and powers conferred by law on a prosecuting attorney, including, but not limited to, the power to appear before a grand jury and to interrogate witnesses before a grand jury.
Arnebeck said that the Attorney General's office said they were ready to begin the investigation of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, and Arnebeck said he submitted a great deal of material to them, including "Bob's [Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman's] book on what happened in Ohio, documentation of the exit poll discrepancy, [and] John Conyers' report to the Congress which was the factual basis for the challenge to the electoral votes of the Ohio vote in January of 2005."
About a month later, the Attorney General's office contacted Arnebeck and asked him, "Who do you want to indict?"
Arnebeck explained that the AG's "concept of looking at this from a criminal standpoint was not to convene a grand jury and cast the net broadly and use the grand jury process to investigate and narrow the focus into the question of who may have tampered with those votes. But rather they wanted us to come to them with a more focused case."
Arnebeck then informed the AG that they were going to file the motion to lift the stay so that the plaintiffs "could proceed with the civil case in order to collect discovery to do that" and create a more focused case.
Fitrakis, who was also at today's presser, said that early on they went to Washington and met with the House Judiciary staff who agreed to come to Ohio in early March of 2007. Fitrakis informed Ohio's then-Attorney General Mark Dann's office, but the office never got back to them.
Arnebeck said they are prepared "to go after the issues of election integrity in a very targeted way, as opposed to a casting of a fishing net. We're able to do some 'rifle shots.'"
Arnebeck also explained that he met with Conyers within the last two weeks. He made the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee aware of what they have: new resources and information, and the assistance of Spoonamore to help the state of Ohio, the Congress, and the court understand what needs to be done to help secure the 2008 election.
Also, Arnebeck has sent out document "hold" notices. A hold notice is, essentially, a letter sent to the parties of a lawsuit informing them of their legal obligation to hold on to (and not destroy) all relevant documents, including electronic documents such as emails, pending the outcome of the suit.
Hold letters have been sent to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, asking them to hold documents relating to their activities to use corporate money to influence the Ohio Supreme Court elections. Another hold letter was sent to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking that he advise the federal government to hold emails from Karl Rove.
Arnebeck said "We think [Rove] is an individual who has been at the center of both the use of corporate money to attack state Attorneys General and their elections and candidates for the Supreme Court and their elections in the states, and also in the manipulation of the election process.
"We expressed concern about the reports that Mr. Rove destroyed his emails and suggested that we want the duplicates that should exist [to be put] under the control of the Secret Service and be sure that those are retained, as well as those on the receiving end in the Justice Department and elsewhere, that those documents are retained for purposes of this litigation, in which we anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."
Arnebeck said they are prepared "to go after the issues of election integrity in a very targeted way, as opposed to a casting of a fishing net. We're able to do some 'rifle shots.'"
Along those lines, Arnebeck plans to subpoena and depose GOP operative Michael (Mike) L. Connell, who as described by SourceWatch, is....
Chief Political Strategist and CEO of New Media Communications, Inc., a Republican website development and internet services firm based in Richfield, OH.
New Media's GOP clients are a "'Who's Who' of Republican politics", having provided campaign web services and Internet strategy for Bush-Cheney 2000/2004, as well as Republicans such as Dick Armey, Spencer Abraham for Senate 2000, Heather Wilson for Congress 2000/2002/2004, Rick Santorum for Senate 2000/2006, and John Thune for Senate 2002/2004 to name just a few. New Media also designed GOP.com for the Republican National Committee, RGA.org for the Republican Governors Association, and between two and three dozen state GOP sites.
According to Arnebeck, Connell "[D]esigns websites and he manages the information technology. Interestingly, he's done this for the Bush campaign of 2000 and the Bush campaign of 2004. Simultaneously, he was doing IT work for the State of Florida in 2000, and for the office of the [Ohio] Secretary of State in 2004.
"And just think of this: here's a person who is an instrument of a major presidential campaign simultaneously setting up the hosting of the votes in the Ohio election."
"And just think of this: here's a person who is an instrument of a major presidential campaign simultaneously setting up the hosting of the votes in the Ohio election."
Arnebeck added: "We're not saying that he [Connell] did anything wrong in the sense of his conduct, but we're saying that these conflicting roles raise some issues."
According to Arnebeck, "Mr. Connell also worked with the various front groups for the US Chamber, tobacco industry front groups, and starting in 2000 after the New Hampshire primary, there was an unleashing of a variety of these Washington-based lobbying groups that created these phony grass-roots groups that attack candidates, supposedly independently. We believe there is clear evidence of a coordinated campaign in which Mr. Rove is involved, in which Mr. Connell is an instrument. And this emphasizes his value of a witness in bringing some of this together."
Indeed, Arnebeck believes that Connell's role in the suit, at least at first, will be that of a witness. "He, by virtue of his involvement in a variety of these roles that we're concerned with --- as a witness, he can provide a perspective. He's the one person who can bring a great deal of information together to better inform folks of what happened and what some of the vulnerabilities are and where some of the data security breaches may have occurred."
One of the more frightening aspects of Connell's work is that his company, Gov Tech Solutions, was the first private company to be allowed to put servers behind the firewall of the Congressional computer systems. This led to him creating and managing several powerful Committee IT networks, including those for the House Intelligence Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Ethics Committee, and the House Committee on Rules. Of course, it is completely possible that the firewall could have been created with secret security gaps that can be exploited to hack into any congressional computer. If that has happened, every computer in any senate or congressional office is subject to hacking by Bush/Republican operatives.
Currently, Connell is running the IT operations for the McCain campaign. Isn't that a comforting thought…
Expert advisor Stephen Spoonamore, who among other things designs and runs computer programs to analyze and detect fraudulent financial activity for the world's leading credit card companies, said, "You cannot secure electronic voting. You set up a bunch of grandmothers to put together a bunch of computers once every two years, basically those machines are architected in such a manner to maximize their capacity [for] fraud.
"In the 2004 election, from my perspective, on any of the programs we run for any of my credit card clients, the results from the 14 counties, those are the sort of results that would instantaneously launch a credit card fraud investigation or a banking settlement investigation."
Spoonamore's reference to the "14 counties" refers to the so-called "Connelly Anomaly" in which down-ticket candidates got more votes than John Kerry. The name comes from the candidacy of C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American woman who was running for the Ohio Supreme Court in 2004. She was endorsed by pro-choice and civil rights groups, and was relatively unknown to Ohio voters, in addition to being vastly outspent by her opponent in the campaign. Yet, somehow, Connelly got scores of thousands more votes than did John Kerry at the very top of the ticket.
Arnebeck said that "if you adjust for the [Connelly] anomaly or that situation, it's enough votes to have changed the outcome of the election. So the focus of our efforts, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, would be to find out who is responsible for that."
He targeted the Rapp family and the Triad Voting Systems company, who ran the tabulators in a number of Ohio counties in 2004, as those who need to be closely investigated.
"If it's the Rapp family and the programming of the [Triad] tabulators," Arnebeck stated, "we need to know that so that the Rapp family will be closely monitored, if not put in jail, before the 2008 election."
Spoonamore continued, "I am extremely confident in [our] analysis of the 2004 election anomalies because of the way the tabulators were programmed, and all were programmed by the Rapp family on Triad systems. So in my opinion, there should be an investigation launched into exactly what happened.
"There was an enormous number of strange activities in which Triad and the Rapp family were running around the state taking hard drives out of computers, putting in new hard drives, and posting poll results. And the reason all this was going on, I'm quite confident, was that the hard drives they were pulling out had fraudulent coding. Simple as that."
"There was an enormous number of strange activities in which Triad and the Rapp family were running around the state taking hard drives out of computers, putting in new hard drives, and posting poll results. And the reason all this was going on, I'm quite confident, was that the hard drives they were pulling out had fraudulent coding. Simple as that."
"Certainly if that happened at one of our banks, you could be arrested."
Spoonamore has told Arnebeck and the plaintiffs that there is a clear pattern of fraud. He said the Ohio 2004 election was "a frighteningly un-auditable system."
"When, in the Green Party recount, all of the sudden [people are] driving around the state pulling and swapping hard drives, they should have been in handcuffs that day," argued Spoonamore.
Arnebeck noted that Triad Voting Systems "has never been interrogated under oath in either a civil or a criminal context, to the best of our knowledge. There was an FBI investigation launched at the request of John Conyers, and very shortly a letter coming back from the FBI stating that they had found no problem. But it was very minimal and it appears to have been a politicized investigation, not a normal serious investigation by the FBI."
Spoonamore said that he knows the key FBI cyber investigation people "quite well, and they were certainly never involved [in the investigation Conyers requested], there was no hardware ever involved. So whatever investigation was launched, it was topical, but they never examined the equipment."
When the stay on the King Lincoln case is lifted, Arnebeck intends to depose Connell, key members of the Rapp family, and says that he will make Spoonamore available as an expert witness and advisor. After discovery, they will amend their complaint as needed and "focus on corrective actions that are necessary for the protection of the 2008 election."
More quotes from today's presser…
Spoonamore on vote counting: "What happens at the end of the day, all those votes are thrown into a magic box with one troll inside, the troll jumps out and says 'Here are your results! Ta-Da!!' That's it. There's no validation of the code, there's no authentication.
"With the Connelly Anomaly, if that was in a banking environment, instantaneously --- instantaneously! --- the entire system inside that box would be frozen. Any programmer who reviewed any of that code would be alerted, all the executives assisting in that process would be alerted, the hard drives would be frozen in place, extracted and immediately placed in forensic analysis. 'Cause somebody did something major."
Spoonamore again: "None of us [the American people] really want to confront the fact that there appears to be an extremely coordinated effort by a very small group of people to rig elections and take control of the executive branch."
"You can spend all day every day looking at this stuff and saying, 'Well that would certainly launch a fraud investigation in a bank, but it doesn't when it comes to our vote.' Why?"
"This entire system is being programmed in secret by programmers who have no oversight by anybody. In my opinion, both sides [Democrats and Republicans] have no friggin' clue what they're talking about."
When asked by a reporter to respond to the fact that both Democratic and Republican Secretaries of State and elected officials will say that our elections are run on a bi-partisan system, Spoonamore responded, "No it's not. It's not a bi-partisan system. This entire system is being programmed in secret by programmers who have no oversight by anybody. In my opinion, both sides [Democrats and Republicans] have no friggin' clue what they're talking about."
"The person who programs the code inside the machine will decide the results."
Spoonamore was asked, "Are you a Republican?" And his priceless response was "Yes, I've been a life-long member of the Republican party. Sadly." That prompted a burst of laughter from all assembled.
When a reporter asked Cliff Arnebeck what specifically he alleges Karl Rove did, Arnebeck said, "Karl Rove was involved in the Bush campaign for president in 2000. Our understanding is when they lost the New Hampshire primary, they were quite concerned and they made a decision to take the gloves off. Mr. Rove contact[ed] people with whom he had worked with in the industry, Grover Norquist and others, on behalf of the tobacco industry.
"At the time, the tobacco industry was fighting the Clinton administration $260 billion class action RICO case. That industry alone had a tremendous incentive to do whatever was necessary to kill that lawsuit. And George Bush, on Rove's recommendation, positioned himself as a reformer with results. Not meaning the McCain reform with campaign finance reform, but the Bush reform in Texas where they changed the composition of the Texas Supreme Court to be business-friendly and to effectively immunize corporations from meaningful tort liability.
"They turned these groups loose in South Carolina, they won South Carolina with a lot of independent expenditures and dirty tricks.
"Rove was the architect of a strategy to, in effect, undo the rule of law, turn business loose free of government regulation.
"We certainly want to take his [Rove's] deposition. His deposition has never been taken. Mr. Conyers is currently seeking his deposition in regard to what he did...in terms of going after Governor Siegelman in Alabama. And Mr. Rove is currently evading the congressional subpoena for his testimony."
Friday, July 18, 2008
Your police state
One Million Terrorists?
by Paul Craig Roberts
The Bush Regime's "terrorist" protection schemes have reached the height of total incompetence and utter absurdity. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a private organization that defends the US Constitution that inattentive Americans neglect, there are now one million names on the "terrorist" watch list.
One of them is that of former Assistant US Attorney General Jim Robinson, whose top security clearances are current. Every time Mr. Robinson flies away on business, he is delayed by a totally incompetent "terrorist" protection racket that cannot tell a person named Jim Robinson, who served in the highest echelons of the US government, from a Muslim terrorist.
What confidence can we have in a regime that is incapable of differentiating an Assistant US Attorney General from a terrorist?
Mr. Robinson said: "If I were convinced that America is a safer place because I get hassled at the airport, I might put up with it, but I doubt it. I expect my story is similar to hundreds of thousands of people who are on this list and find themselves inconvenienced."
"Hundreds of thousands of people" on a watch list that they have no business being on?
Yes. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.
And this is America, not Nazi Germany?
How can Airport "Security" possibly protect anyone when the idiots cannot differentiate a high level American government official from a terrorist?
Do you really believe there are one million terrorists and nothing has blown up in the US since September 11, 2001 (assuming you believe the government's account of that episode)?
How can there possibly be 1,000,000 terrorists and America still be in one piece? If there were 1,000,000 terrorists, America would be in ruins. According to the Bush Regime's line, it only took a handful of terrorists to destroy America's tallest skyscrapers and a section of the Pentagon and to send the President of the United States scurrying to a hiding place.
One million terrorists could bring America to its knees, and they wouldn't need to fly on airplanes to accomplish this.
What we are witnessing with the one million person "watch list" is bureaucracy run amok. One Million Terrorists makes the danger seem overwhelming. Such overwhelming danger rationalizes the aggressive behavior of the bullies and thugs attracted by the power of confiscating your toothpaste and bottled water and riffling your belongings in your luggage.
Show your ID.
Take off your shoes.
Take off your belt.
Take off your jacket.
Empty your pockets.
Don't complain about being searched without a warrant or you will miss your flight. You might be arrested, handcuffed, kicked and otherwise abused – the fate of many American citizens.
The morons who comprise the US government call the "watch list" one of the government's "most effective tools in the fight against terrorism."
What an effective tool it is! It cannot tell the difference between Jim Robinson and a Muslim terrorist.
The "watch list" has not apprehended a single terrorist, but thousands of American citizens have been inconvenienced and arrested.
The ACLU says that "putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning."
It is worse than that. What the "watch list" or "no-fly list" is doing is training Americans to submit to warrantless searches, to abandon their constitutional rights, and to submit to humiliation by thugs and bullies. A Gestapo is being trained to have no qualms about searching and intimidating fellow citizens, using any excuse to delay or arrest them. Americans are being taught to use arbitrary power and to submit to arbitrary power. In the false name of "safety from terrorists," Americans are being made the least safe people on earth.
Original article posted here.
by Paul Craig Roberts
The Bush Regime's "terrorist" protection schemes have reached the height of total incompetence and utter absurdity. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a private organization that defends the US Constitution that inattentive Americans neglect, there are now one million names on the "terrorist" watch list.
One of them is that of former Assistant US Attorney General Jim Robinson, whose top security clearances are current. Every time Mr. Robinson flies away on business, he is delayed by a totally incompetent "terrorist" protection racket that cannot tell a person named Jim Robinson, who served in the highest echelons of the US government, from a Muslim terrorist.
What confidence can we have in a regime that is incapable of differentiating an Assistant US Attorney General from a terrorist?
Mr. Robinson said: "If I were convinced that America is a safer place because I get hassled at the airport, I might put up with it, but I doubt it. I expect my story is similar to hundreds of thousands of people who are on this list and find themselves inconvenienced."
"Hundreds of thousands of people" on a watch list that they have no business being on?
Yes. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.
And this is America, not Nazi Germany?
How can Airport "Security" possibly protect anyone when the idiots cannot differentiate a high level American government official from a terrorist?
Do you really believe there are one million terrorists and nothing has blown up in the US since September 11, 2001 (assuming you believe the government's account of that episode)?
How can there possibly be 1,000,000 terrorists and America still be in one piece? If there were 1,000,000 terrorists, America would be in ruins. According to the Bush Regime's line, it only took a handful of terrorists to destroy America's tallest skyscrapers and a section of the Pentagon and to send the President of the United States scurrying to a hiding place.
One million terrorists could bring America to its knees, and they wouldn't need to fly on airplanes to accomplish this.
What we are witnessing with the one million person "watch list" is bureaucracy run amok. One Million Terrorists makes the danger seem overwhelming. Such overwhelming danger rationalizes the aggressive behavior of the bullies and thugs attracted by the power of confiscating your toothpaste and bottled water and riffling your belongings in your luggage.
Show your ID.
Take off your shoes.
Take off your belt.
Take off your jacket.
Empty your pockets.
Don't complain about being searched without a warrant or you will miss your flight. You might be arrested, handcuffed, kicked and otherwise abused – the fate of many American citizens.
The morons who comprise the US government call the "watch list" one of the government's "most effective tools in the fight against terrorism."
What an effective tool it is! It cannot tell the difference between Jim Robinson and a Muslim terrorist.
The "watch list" has not apprehended a single terrorist, but thousands of American citizens have been inconvenienced and arrested.
The ACLU says that "putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning."
It is worse than that. What the "watch list" or "no-fly list" is doing is training Americans to submit to warrantless searches, to abandon their constitutional rights, and to submit to humiliation by thugs and bullies. A Gestapo is being trained to have no qualms about searching and intimidating fellow citizens, using any excuse to delay or arrest them. Americans are being taught to use arbitrary power and to submit to arbitrary power. In the false name of "safety from terrorists," Americans are being made the least safe people on earth.
Original article posted here.
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