Objectively Pro-Rape

Al Franken went out deep on a limb and made his first amendment to face a roll-call vote to stop the practice of defense contractors essentially allowing consequence-free rape on their overseas bases:

On Tuesday night, the Minnesota Democrat got his first piece of legislation passed by the United States Senate via roll call vote. The amendment stopped federal funding for those defense contractors who used mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of assault the right to bring their case to court. It passed by a 68-30 margin with nine Republicans joining each voting Democrat. And in the immediate aftermath, Franken was granted the chance to revel, ever so slightly, in his victory.\

"The story came to my attention of Jamie Leigh Jones who, when she was 19, went to Iraq to work for [defense contractor] KBR and she was put in the barracks with 400 men and was sexually harassed," Franken told the Huffington Post in a brief interview shortly after the vote. "She complained. But they didn't do anything about it. She was drugged and gang raped and they locked her up in a shipping container. She tried to sue KBR and they said you have a mandatory arbitration clause in your contract. She tried to fight back and said this is ridiculous. She took it to court and they have been fighting her for three years."

"This bill would make it so that anybody in business with the Department of the Defense can't do this," he concluded emphatically. "They can't have mandatory arbitration on issues like assault and battery."

You'd think this kind of amendment wouldn't only get 100 votes, but somehow former Senators would storm the floor and demand that they too could offer their support for the legislation. Instead, in the culture we now have in Washington, 30 Republicans voted against this. I don't know how you characterize this other than saying that they think it's perfectly reasonable for women to be raped on Defense Department-funded American bases, left in shipping containers, and barred from bringing up charges subsequently. They actually called this a political attack aimed at Halliburton, even though the bill named no contractor specifically.

Um, what would you call the "Defund ACORN Act," exactly? And while I know that was the biggest scandal in the history of scandals, AFAIK ACORN has never protected their employees from raping someone and detaining them in a shipping container. Again, to the best of my knowledge.

These Republicans should be completely ashamed of themselves.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, while the Franken amendment was nice, the overall defense authorization bill includes lots of spending for the war in Afghanistan, and would ban the transfer of any detainee at Gitmo to the United States. As Franken would say, "Oy."

More Torture Tapes

I think these things are starting to reproduce like spores:

Would it surprise you to know that the government just admitted to another torture tape, this one of Mohammed al-Qahtani's treatment? The Obama Administration has continued the Bush Administration's attempts to stonewall on release of this material.

The government never disclosed the existence of these tapes as exculpatory information in Mr. al Qahtani’s habeas case. CCR had filed a motion in February 2009 to compel the government to turn over exculpatory evidence in their client’s case and to hold the government in contempt for it’s “flagrant violation” of a judge’s November 2008 order to do so [...] The videotapes the government is required to produce will reveal the time period at the end of three months of intensive solitary confinement and isolation that immediately preceded the implementation of the “First Special Interrogation Plan,” a regime of systematic torture techniques approved by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for use against Mr. al Qahtani. In a letter to his superiors reporting possible abuse of men in U.S. custody, T.J. Harrington, Deputy Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division, FBI described Mr. al Qahtani during this time as “evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reportedly hearing voices, crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end).”

The lawyers will receive these tapes, based on the judge's order. Qahtani is the man Susan Crawford, who helped run Gitmo for the Bush Administration, admitted was tortured by the US government.

The Obama Administration will never be able to suppress all this evidence forever. They might as well come clean about the past.

The Self-Entangling Giant

White House officials are trying to prepare the ground for the fact that they're not going to close Guantanamo on time. I believe Obama boasted in his UN address that he announced the closure of Gitmo.

Senior administration officials told The Associated Press that difficulties in completing the lengthy review of detainee files and resolving thorny legal and logistical questions mean the president's self-imposed January deadline may slip. Obama remains as committed to closing the facility as he was when, as one of his first acts in office, he pledged to shut it down, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to more freely discuss the sensitive issue. They said the White House still was hoping to meet the deadline through a stepped-up effort.

The prison in Cuba was created by former President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a landing spot for suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But it has since become a lightning rod of anti-U.S. criticism around the globe. There are approximately 225 detainees still being held at the prison.

People may give a little slack if we're talking months, but of course we won't see the closure of American prisons holding suspects indefinitely. Bagram is still open, and the White House is trying to run some B.S. military commission-like trial to give the illusion habeas rights, which fall far short of that goal. They haven't set the rules for military trials at Guantanamo, or found a location for the prisoners they want to keep, or host countries that will take the ones who can be let go. And they want to use Bush-era theories about the authorization of military force against Al Qaeda giving them authority to use preventive detention and hold suspects without charges. This may be a small victory because they are not setting preventive detention into statutory authority through Congress, but it remains the case that this Administration still wants to hold suspects without charges, is doing so at Bagram and is dragging their feet on closing Guantanamo.

This leads to a more general point: when it comes to uprooting ("changing") the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism and civil liberties -- the issue which generated as much opposition to the last presidency as anything else -- the Obama administration has proven rather conclusively that tiny and cosmetic adjustments are the most it is willing to do. They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers. With great fanfare, they announced the closing of CIA black sites -- at a time when none was operating. They trumpeted the President's order that no interrogation tactics outside of the Army Field Manual could be used -- at a time when approval for such tactics had been withdrawn. They repudiated the most extreme elements of the Bush/Addington/Yoo "inherent power" theories -- while maintaining alternative justifications to enable the same exact policies to proceed exactly as is. They flamboyantly touted the closing of Guantanamo -- while aggressively defending the right to abduct people from around the world and then imprison them with no due process at Bagram. Their "changes" exist solely in theory -- which isn't to say that they are all irrelevant, but it is to say that they change nothing in practice: i.e., in reality.

Greenwald references this Gary Wills article in forwarding the argument that a country in a near-permanent state of war will always assert these kind of expansive powers for reasons of national security :

That is just one of the hundreds of holdings in the empire created by the National Security State. A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

The White House has replaced the leadership dealing with Guantanamo closure, and maybe they'll regroup and get the place closed in short order. But the permanent national security society, and the political momentum behind it, will resist real transformation in this area.

Disappointment On Civil Liberties

I think I was too soon in my tempered praise for Obama's decision on Bagram Air Force Base. Yes, prisoners there will have an opportunity to challenge their detention, but basically using the same process found unconstitutional when tried at Guantanamo. This still denies prisoners basic habeas rights in a court of law and allows the government to abduct anyone and send them to Bagram indefinitely, where they cannot challenge their detention properly. In fact, since the action was in response to a court order to allow non-Afghan prisoners a right to plead their case, the detainees will probably have no opportunity to act on this until years of litigation over whether this system can pass Constitutional muster. As one of the representatives for Gitmo detainees said yesterday, "It’s another stall. And one I would have expected from the Bush administration but not the Obama administration."

Boy, how many times have we heard that? In addition to turning Bagram into Guantanamo East and seemingly stocking prisoners there outside any review process, this Administration wants to create a legal process for preventive detention, enabling them to hold anyone without charges indefinitely, which Russ Feingold has called "a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world." Obama's CIA continue to use the state secrets privilege to get out of a host of different accountability measures. And just yesterday, the Administration announced that they support renewing all sections of the Patriot Act.

The Obama administration has for the first time set out its views on the controversial USA Patriot Act, telling lawmakers this week that legal approval of government surveillance methods scheduled to expire in December should be renewed, but leaving room to tweak the law to protect Americans' privacy.

In a letter from Justice Department officials to key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the administration recommended that Congress move swiftly with legislation that would protect the government's ability to collect a variety of business and credit card records and to monitor terrorism suspects with roving wiretaps.

But Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich also told Democrats that the administration is "willing to consider" additional privacy safeguards advocated by lawmakers, so long as the provisions do not "undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities."

The three provisions set to expire Dec. 31 allow investigators to monitor through roving wiretaps suspects who may be trying to escape detection by switching cellphone numbers, obtain business records of national security targets, and track "lone wolves" who may be acting alone on behalf of foreign powers or terrorist groups. The government has not employed the lone wolf provision, but department officials want to ensure they can do so in the future.

Well, that's nice, they're "willing to consider" privacy safeguards. It's not like we've had multiple reports of the FBI violating privacy through unauthorized national security letters or wiretaps that capture the information of individual Americans. With Russ Feingold and Dick Durbin working on a bill including these safeguards, some advocacy groups are optimistic, but given the Administration record on civil liberties to this point, I'm not sure why.

The President, a Constitutional scholar, is doing what executives in the executive branch typically do - aggrandize their power in the manner of the previous occupant of the office. The courts and Congress need to do what's necessary to stop them. But when the previous President so flagrantly abused the privacy protections and civil rights of American citizens and violated the country's laws, you'd think that the new man on campus would trim his sails a little bit.

The Slow Wheels Of Justice At Guantanamo

Mohammed Jawad was captured by US forces when he was 12 years old, and under torture, he confessed to charges of terrorism. His initial arrest was for throwing a grenade at US soldiers in Afghanistan. These are two different incidents; the latter may or may not be a crime, but the former is just a pretense to label Jawad an enemy combatant and detain him indefinitely. The Obama Justice Department has admitted that it has no evidence to justify the continued holding of Jawad as an enemy combatant, and judges have repeatedly considered his confession inadmissable in court. Today, the Justice Department will relent on that point, but ask to delay Jawad's release until they determine whether they can bring federal charges against him.

Avoiding a showdown with a federal judge, the Obama administration agreed Wednesday to release from Guantanamo Bay an Afghan prisoner who was captured as a teenager and held nearly seven years for allegedly throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers.

The government said it would "promptly release" Mohammed Jawad, now 23, and send him to Afghanistan -- but only after it sent a required notification to Congress explaining whether his release would pose a risk to national security. That will take 22 days, the administration said [...]

The case could have led to a constitutional showdown, because no judge has forced the release of a Guantanamo prisoner over the objections of the government.

But in Wednesday's order, the administration agreed to release Jawad after informing Congress. Lawmakers adopted an appropriations measure this year that requires the administration to provide "an assessment of any risk to the national security" before freeing a Guantanamo prisoner.

Jonathan Hafetz, an ACLU lawyer for Jawad, said he was "cautiously optimistic" that his client would be released soon.

I cannot see how the DoJ can justify keeping Jawad beyond those 22 days. He's spend 1/3 of his life in US custody. The grenade attack, not confirmed, occurred in the midst of a war zone. The Attorney General of Afghanistan is asking that he be returned home. We need to consider this time served and let him go.

This, by the way, is how the justice system should work - a detainee gets a habeas hearing to question his imprisonment, and the government can then either charge or release.

The Silent Riot At Bagram

From the did you know file, did you know that the United States continues to operate, and assert the legality of operating, a detention facility that indefinitely locks up suspects without charging them? No, not Guantanamo, which the President has vowed to close. I'm talking about Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, which is not merely a POW facility but which ships in terror suspects from all over the world and confines them in a legal black hole. There is little knowledge of this or outcry about it in the United States, but the prisoners themselves have begun acts of civil disobedience.

The prisoners at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan have refused to leave their cells for at least the past two weeks to protest their indefinite imprisonment, according to lawyers and the families of detainees.

The prison-wide protest, which has been going on since at least July 1, offers a rare glimpse inside a facility that is even more closed off to the public than the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Information about the protest came to light when the International Committee of the Red Cross informed the families of several detainees that scheduled video teleconferences and family visits were being canceled.

Representatives of the ICRC, which monitors the treatment of detainees and arranges the calls, last visited the Bagram prison on July 5, but inmates were unwilling to meet with them.

"We have suspended our video telephone conference and family visit programs because the detainees have informed us they do not wish to participate in the programs for the time being," said Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization.

The 620 prisoners at Bagram, more than twice that of Guantanamo, have no access to attorneys. The facility is being rebuilt to hold even more prisoners, up to 1,000. And at least over three dozen of them have been captured around the world and transferred to Bagram, with no connection whatsoever to the war in Afghanistan.

This is a blight on our country, we must deal with the human rights and legal abuses at all of our detention facilities, including Bagram. What's disgusting is that the prisoners are more actively engaged in this than almost anyone in this country.

...and then you have people like Lindsey Graham, who thinks we should hold detainees without charges "until they die."

And Justice For None

Glenn Greenwald has the gory details about yet another civil liberties backtrack for the White House, introducing the new term of "presidential post-acquittal detention power." Basically, if the Administration puts a terror suspect on trial and they are actually found innocent, the President reserves the right to detain them anyway for an indefinite period.

All of this underscores what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal: to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison. They'll create various procedures to prettify the process, but the outcome is always the same -- ongoing detention for as long as the President dictates. This is how I described it when Obama first unveiled his proposal of preventive detention:

If you really think about the argument Obama made yesterday -- when he described the five categories of detainees and the procedures to which each will be subjected -- it becomes manifest just how profound a violation of Western conceptions of justice this is. What Obama is saying is this: we'll give real trials only to those detainees we know in advance we will convict. For those we don't think we can convict in a real court, we'll get convictions in the military commissions I'm creating. For those we can't convict even in my military commissions, we'll just imprison them anyway with no charges ("preventively detain" them).

After yesterday, we have to add an even more extreme prong to this policy: if by chance we miscalculate and deign to give a trial to a detainee who is then acquitted, we'll still just keep them in prison anyway by presidential decree. That added step renders my criticism of Obama's conception of "justice" even more applicable:

Giving trials to people only when you know for sure, in advance, that you'll get convictions is not due process. Those are called "show trials." In a healthy system of justice, the Government gives everyone it wants to imprison a trial and then imprisons only those whom it can convict. The process is constant (trials), and the outcome varies (convictions or acquittals). Obama is saying the opposite: in his scheme, it is the outcome that is constant (everyone ends up imprisoned), while the process varies and is determined by the Government (trials for some; military commissions for others; indefinite detention for the rest). The Government picks and chooses which process you get in order to ensure that it always wins. A more warped "system of justice" is hard to imagine.

I get the feeling that if those left at Guantanamo wanted to engage in mass suicide right now, someone in the White House would give the go-ahead to mix the Kool-Aid for them. This is just a problem they don't want to solve.

And of course, the focus on Guantanamo, and the fate of the prisoners there, keeps everyone's eye off of those indefinitely detained at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, without charges, and in greater numbers at this point than in Cuba. Furthermore, what Obama's team has not answered is if they plan to continue these show trials and preventive detention tactics for those they capture, not just the artifacts of the Bush regime. That answer could come soon.

We have, through expansion of executive power, extreme Congressional deference and a failure to counteract the push in the popular culture, allowed the arguments of reactionaries - that any suspect in the so-called "war on terror" must be detained indefinitely until the end of combat in an endless, figurative war - to take hold in the public mind. When these issues made the public debate, when torture became the stuff of online poll topics, when they were allowed legitimacy, we inevitably and inescapably lost that debate. The genie has left the bottle, and while a popular President could put it back in, he has shown absolutely no willingness to expend an ounce of political capital to do so. And we will look back on decisions like this as part of a sad legacy, regardless of the rest of the tenure.

Preventive Detention Floated

John Cole said to prepare for an anti-Obama shit fit based on this news, but isn't it a pro-civil liberties shit fit? A pro-habeas corpus shit fit? A pro-due process shit fit? A pro-hundreds of years of Western-style criminal justice shit fir?

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

After months of internal debate over how to close the military facility in Cuba, White House officials are increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may be impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the prison by the president's January deadline.

It's important to note that an unnamed White House official denies the existence of a draft order, and in the story spokesman Ben LaBolt does the same. But if you believe the general overview of the piece, we're about to see a little over 100 prisoners, with insufficient evidence to be tried but suspicions that they would "return to the battlefield," as it were, if released, will be held indefinitely in a prison, whether it's Guantanamo or not, until such time as they are fit to release, at the end of the so-called war on terror, I suppose.

The Administration is still working from this theory that the only problem with Guantanamo is its symbology and not its reality, that the indefinite detention of prisoners, their torture and abuse, etc., constituted the outrage of the world, not its location.

The other kind of astonishing thing with this idea is that the courts have ALREADY found it unconstitutional. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld pretty much put it to rest. In fact, the attorney for Salim Hamdan in that case was President Obama's own Deputy Solicitor General, Neal Katyal.

If this were sent out as a trial balloon to gauge reaction, hopefully the White House staff will take a click over to TPM:

But it doesn't sound like those groups are pysched about the news, exactly. Shane Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights told TPMmuckraker via email:

Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantanamo system that the President promised to shut down. Whatever form it takes - from Congress or the President's pen - it is anathema to the basic principles of American law and the courts will find it unconstitutional.

Kadidal continued:

Another thing that's odd about this is the idea that this detention authority would somehow be more transient if it were authorized through executive order (which can be reversed at the stroke of the president's pen) rather than a statute (which could sit on the books indefinitely). If the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that executive abuses, left to continue unchecked for many years, have a tendency to congeal into precedent.

In fact, this executive abuse is being carried out to cover up the previous executive abuse, which doesn't excuse Obama for this illegal action, but just shows how untrammeled executive power can just snowball. Indeed, in at least one Guantanamo case, it can be argued that preventive detention will be employed to cover up the torture of one of the potential witnesses in the trial.

Glennzilla notes something even more horrific about this:

There has now emerged a very clear -- and very disturbing -- pattern whereby Obama is willing to use legal mechanisms and recognize the authority of other branches only if he's assured that he'll get the outcome he wants. If he can't get what he wants from those processes, he'll just assert Bush-like unilateral powers to bypass those processes and do what he wants anyway [...]

That, for instance, is the precise pattern that's driving his suppression of torture photos. Two federal courts ordered the President to release the photos under the 40-year-old Freedom of Information Act. Not wanting to abide by that decision, the White House (using Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman) tried to pressure Congress to enact new legislation vesting the administration with the power to override FOIA. When House progressives blocked that bill, the White House assured Lieberman and Graham that Obama would simply use an Executive Order to decree the photos "classified" (when they are plainly nothing of the sort) and thus block their release anyway.

People are starting to wake up to the evidence that the President has basically carried on a good deal of the same abuses of the Bush regime, and this attempt to engage in preventive detention is perhaps the worst example. The idea that the Administration cannot change certain prisoners because we cannot be assured ahead of time that they will win a conviction sets the standard of law completely on its head. As Bob Herbert notes:

Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention , imprisoning people indefinitely, for years and perhaps for life, without charge and without giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their innocence. And yet we’ve embraced it, asserting that there are people who are far too dangerous to even think about releasing but who cannot be put on trial because we have no real evidence that they have committed any crime, or because we’ve tortured them and therefore the evidence would not be admissible, or whatever. President Obama is O.K. with this (he calls it "prolonged detention"), but he wants to make sure it is carried out -- here comes the oxymoron -- fairly and nonabusively. Proof of guilt? In 21st-century America, there is no longer any need for such annoyances. Human rights? Ha-ha. That’s a good one.

More Collateral Damage In The War On Terror

This guy's had some time of things this decade, but he may finally get to go home.

Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al-Janko was tortured by al-Qaeda and imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months because the groups' leaders thought he was an American spy.

Abandoned by his captors in late 2001, he was picked up by U.S. authorities, who shipped him to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion that he was a member of the two groups.

Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Janko's release, saying the government's legal rationale for continuing to detain him "defies common sense."

In a 13-page opinion that he read from the bench, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ordered the government to engage in diplomatic efforts to find a country that would host the 30-year-old detainee. It is unlikely that he will be sent to his native Syria. His attorney, Stephen R. Sady, would like Janko sent "to a safe haven."

"This is a tragedy," Sady said. "The guy was horribly tortured and then tries to report his human rights violation to the U.S. forces. He is a brave person and wants to tell his story. Instead, he gets mistaken for being a terrorist. . . . This is a nightmare for an innocent man being accused of all of these things."

Amazingly, the al-Janko story doesn't even come to mind when thinking of all the injustices meted out during this so-called war on terror. That's how deep the level of injustice has become. I never heard of this guy before reading this story.

When he is released, I hope somebody asks him who treated him better, al Qaeda or the Americans.

By the way, this was a habeas hearing, so remember that the Bush Administration didn't want this man to ever have this opportunity - and neither would the Obama Administration, were al-Janko kept at Bagram Air Force Base.

Who Pissed In Dana Rohrabacher's Corn Flakes?

Dana Rohrabacher has been out front in yipping about the need for the President to rhetorically confront Iran, a stupid idea given our history in the region, and the opposite of what actual Iranian dissidents and experts like Shirin Ebadi, Trita Parsi and Akbar Ganji suggest. As OC Progressive notes, he is undermining the protests and demonstrations by giving credence to the complaint of the ruling regime that foreign interests are intervening in their election. By saber-rattling, like in the passage of a resolution in support of the protests and then wielding it as a club to criticize the President for not being belligerent enough, you just play into the hands of the regime. And Rohrabacher and his colleagues never had this kind of commitment to human rights when it involved the systematic, needless torture of detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In fact, Rohrabacher called those cruel, inhumane and degrading tactics fraternity hazing pranks - when Dick Cheney orders them. When the Iranians or North Koreans order them, it's a whole different ballgame.

But I have to step back and admire - and kind of marvel - at Rohrabacher's comments yesterday about the Uighurs, a group of 18 Muslims held at Guantanamo for seven years without charges, despite having been proven to commit no acts of terrorism or crimes of any kind. Several were released to Bermuda this week, amidst clamoring by many conservatives, in particular Newt Gingrich. But Rohrabacher smacked the former House Speaker down pretty hard on this point, decrying him for raising needless fears. It's idiosyncratic, of course, because it's Rohrabacher, and it mostly constitutes a conspiracy theory about the Chinese government. But embedded in the madness are some true statements about Republican fearmongering and overhyping of threats.

ROHRABACHER: And also, right off the bat, I’d like to express my deep appreciation to the leader in Bermuda — it’s Premier Brown — for his courage to do what is morally right in this situation. He’s demonstrated, I think, the best of democracy. That’s what leadership is all about: being willing to take such tough stands. I’m sorry that our own leadership here at home, and even in my own party, seems lacking at this moment. [...]

Much to my dismay, some pundits in the Republican party have fallen for this bait and are lumping the Uighurs in with Islamic extremists. The Bush administration did not help matters. It held Uighurs in Guantanamo as terrorists, and they did this, I believe, to appease the Chinese government in a pathetic attempt to gain its support at the beginning of the war against Iraq, and also to ensure China’s continued purchase of U.S. treasuries. Many, if not all, the negative allegations against the Uighurs, can be traced by to Communist Chinese intelligence, whose purpose is to snuff out a legitimate independence movement that challenges the Communist party bosses in Beijing.

No patriot, especially no Republican who considers themselves a Reagan Republican, should fall for this manipulation, which has us do the bidding of a dictatorship in Beijing.

In the hall of shame, of course, is our former speaker, Newt Gingrich. His positioning on this should be of no surprise — and is of no surprise — to those of who, during Newt’s leadership, were dismayed by his active support for Clinton-era trade policies with Communist China.

Video here.

Would that Rohrabacher would listen to his own words when saber-rattling against Iran. That moment of clarity - all right, about 1/3 of a moment - ought to be repeated.

Oh yeah, and George Packer is a media royalist buffoon.

Keep Talking, George

While I am somewhat despairing of the prospects for real health care reform today, I can say unreservedly that the prospects go up in an off-the-charts fashion if the reviled George W. Bush keeps talking about it.

Former President George W. Bush fired a salvo at President Obama on Wednesday, asserting his administration's interrogation policies were within the law, declaring the private sector -- not government -- will fix the economy and rejecting the nationalization of health care.

"I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in," the former president said to applause from members of a local business group. "You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money." [...]

But he was less than convinced about Mr. Obama's move to overhaul the health care system.

"There are a lot of ways to remedy the situation without nationalizing health care," Mr. Bush said. "I worry about encouraging the government to replace the private sector when it comes to providing insurance for health care."

I appreciate the description of "the current economic times we're in" as if they just magically appeared and the guy on stage dispensing all this wisdom had nothing to do with it.

And I think most people generally get that as well. George Bush speaking out against anything will have a reverse-Midas effect. He keeps going and we'll have a carbon tax, national health care and his entire cabinet will be held in the stocks.

I love this, too.

On Guantanamo, which while in office Mr. Bush said he wanted to close, the former president was diplomatic.

"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that -- persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

As John Cole says, "I, for one, am really glad Obama dropped his plan to send all of these guys to therapy instead of trying them for alleged crimes. Nice double negative, btw, Bush."

By the way, the public overwhelmingly supports charging or releasing detainees at Gitmo and not just holding them indefinitely, the way Bush, the Republicans, and to a lesser degree Obama wants. That's because it's simply the expected standard of American jurisprudence that we either release or charge those who come through our criminal justice system. Attorney General Holder plans to charge 60, and many more are being released. In the end, we need to stand up for justice here.

Run For Your Lives, Suspect Transferred To Domestic Prison!

Today Ahmed Ghailani arrived in New York to face trial over his role in the US Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Remarkably, the city of New York did not spontaneously empty, nobody started running through the streets in terror, and even Fox News - FOX NEWS - continued to broadcast from their New York studios, despite the presence of a Dangerous Terrorist in their city. So far, Ghailani has not broken free from his cell and gone on a jihadist rampage through Manhattan, ending by climbing the Empire State Building and picking helicopters out of the air. Of course, there's always time.

Republican bedwetters continued to shriek in terror at this development, and to be sure they have a salient point - other than Ramzi Yousef, Zacarias Moussaoui, and 216 total prisoners with ties to terrorism, no Dangerous Terrorist has ever been brought to this country before.

Now that Ghailani is here in the United States, he'll probably be given access to all telecommunications material, and can call his Terrorist friend Lakhdar Boumediene, who obviously is the scariest person on the face of the Earth, and should be locked up for another 7 1/2 years the way he was at Guantanamo since 2001.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Boumediene said the interrogators at Gitmo never once asked him about this alleged plot, which he denied playing any part it.

"I'm a normal man," said Boumediene, who at the time of his arrest worked for the Red Crescent, providing help to orphans and others in need. "I'm not a terrorist."

The 43-year-old Algerian is now back with his wife and two daughters, a free man in France after a Republican judge found the evidence against Boumediene lacking. He is best known from the landmark Supreme Court case last year, Boumediene v. Bush, which said detainees have the right to challenge their detention in court.

That decision was a stunning rebuke of the Bush administration's policies on terror suspects. It set up a ruling by District Court Judge Richard Leon, a former counsel to Republicans in Congress appointed to the bench by Bush, that there was no credible evidence to keep Boumediene detained.

After what Boumediene described as a 7½ year nightmare, he is now a free man. Boumediene: "I don't think. I'm sure" about torture [...]

Boumediene described being pulled up from under his arms while sitting in a chair with his legs shackled, stretching him. He said that he was forced to run with the camp's guards and if he could not keep up, he was dragged, bloody and bruised.

He described what he called the "games" the guards would play after he began a hunger strike, putting his food IV up his nose and poking the hypodermic needle in the wrong part of his arm.

"You think that's not torture? What's this? What can you call this? Torture or what?" he said, indicating the scars he bears from tight shackles. "I'm an animal? I'm not a human?"

Well, he was so dangerous that a judge found he had no material support to terrorism! What would YOU do to him? We have to torture anyone as long as it protects the country - unless we're talking about right-wing domestic terrorists.

I don't want to see those 17 Uighurs who were cleared for release getting any funny ideas about being free, either.

OK, I can't keep this up.

Bipartisan Fear

So when Republicans make the stupidest argument in the world and Democrats decide to go along with it rather than refute it, we get this unsurprising piece of public opinion:

Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to closing the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and moving some of the detainees to prisons on U.S. soil, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.

By more than 2-1, those surveyed say Guantanamo shouldn't be closed. By more than 3-1, they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists housed there to prisons in their own states.

The findings underscore the difficult task President Obama faces in convincing those at home that he should follow through on his campaign promise to close the prison in Cuba, especially in the absence of a plan of where the prisoners would go.

In many parts of the world, however, Gitmo has become a symbol of U.S. arrogance and abuse, and Obama has cited its closure as a way to lay the foundation for better relations. He is scheduled to deliver a major address aimed at the Muslim world on Thursday from Cairo.

It is one of the few subjects on which most Americans side with the views of the Bush administration over its successor.

Obama has actually tried to turn this one around, but with no allies, he cannot do it all.

Meanwhile, another prisoner committed suicide yesterday at Guantanamo.

Putting people in cages for life with no charges -- thousands of miles from their homes -- is inherently torturous. While Salih acknowledged fighting for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, there is no evidence that he ever engaged in or planned to engage in terrorist acts or acts of violence of any kind against the U.S. Apparently, though, he's one of the Worst of the Worst we keep hearing about -- Too Dangerous To Release even if we can't charge him with any crime [...]

As today's NYT article put it: "detainees lawyers, including those representing other Yemeni detainees, have been saying that many prisoners are desperate and that many are suicidal because they see no end to their detention." It's the system of indefinite detention with no trials, not the locale of the cage, that is so oppressive and destructive.

Those Gitmo detainees are such the worst of the worst that some are engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, always the first resort of a hardened terrorist.

A group of Muslims from China awaiting a court-ordered release staged a self-styled protest inside their prison camp Monday, waving signs demanding their freedom written in crayon on their Pentagon-issued art supplies.

''We are the Uighurs,'' said one sign. "We are being oppressed in prison though we had been announced innocent.''

Another: "We need to freedom.''

In the article, one Navy chief says the protest proves how free the Uighurs are. This chief was reportedly a real human being and not a George Orwell character.

Some of our better members of Congress, like Russ Feingold and Jerrold Nadler are stepping up and holding hearings on the proposed system of indefinite detention and the official secrecy surrounding it. But until the Democratic leadership backs up these efforts with advocacy and reassurance to their constituents, nothing will change. Given those fresh poll numbers for them to cower in fear at, my expectations are low.

You Don't Have To Stay Here But You Can't Go Home

When the final history is written on this era, we will be as ashamed with ourselves about the Uighurs as we are with Korematsu:

The Obama administration, picking up the argument of its predecessor, is opposing the release of Chinese Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay into the United States.

In papers filed with the Supreme Court late Friday, the administration says a group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE'-gurz) are being lawfully held at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba even though they are not considered enemy combatants.

The administration says a federal appeals court ruling that blocked the Uighurs' release in the United States should be upheld. The government is trying to find another country to take them.

The Uighurs' "continued presence at Guantanamo Bay is not unlawful detention, but rather the consequence of their lawful exclusion from the United States," Solicitor General Elena Kagan told the court.

The men are held apart from the other detainees, in the least restrictive conditions, Kagan said. "They are free to leave Guantanamo Bay to go to any country that is willing to accept them," she said.

Apparently Australia is being tapped, again - they turned down Bush twice when they tried to resettle the Uighurs. Until that time, our government is literally saying that a group of people who have committed no crime, who were falsely imprisoned and detained for over seven years, cannot be allowed to leave prison even after a federal judge has exonerated them and ordered them released. And they frame it in the most disingenuous way possible - saying they are "free to leave" when that is patently false. They even have the audacity to allege that the living conditions in the prison are just peachy:

Somewhat shockingly, as ABC’s Jake Tapper notes, the Obama administration’s petition suggests that the Uighurs’ imprisonment “isn’t so bad,” and trumpets their comfy quarters at Guantanamo:

“In contrast to individuals currently detained as enemies under the laws of war, petitioners are being housed under relatively unrestrictive conditions, given the status of Guantanamo Bay as a United States military base,” Kagan writes, saying they are “in special communal housing with access to all areas of their camp, including an outdoor recreation space and picnic area.” They “sleep in an air-conditioned bunk house and have the use of an activity room equipped with various recreational items, including a television with VCR and DVD players, a stereo system, and sports equipment.”

I'm so annoyed, I could spit. The Administration has tried to have it both ways on civil liberties and terrorism policy so many times now. This latest argument, consigning the Uighurs to a legal black hole, is particularly distasteful.

I have no idea whether or not the administration's argument is correct as a matter of law. Moreover, I don't care. Whatever the law says about whether it can be forced to admit the Uighurs, the administration has the right to admit them voluntarily. If it cannot find another country that is willing to take them, then it should.

We set up a system that gave people incentives to turn over people they claimed were foreign fighters, whether they were or not. We then dismantled all our normal procedures for separating combatants from non-combatants. It should not surprise anyone that we ended up detaining people who were innocent.

I have no problem with the government taking some reasonable period of time to try to identify another country that is willing to take detainees who cannot be returned to their own countries. But these detainees have been held for seven and a half years. That's not a reasonable amount of time to tie up loose ends; it's a tenth of a normal lifespan.

We screwed up. We should step up to the plate and do what's right. Seven and a half years is too long.

I'm seeing less and less change from this Administration by the day.

They Get Our News

I seem to remember a common complaint during the Bush era that Al Qaeda was watching our TV shows and paying attention to what Democrats have to say, and when they criticized the President, Osama bin Laden rejoiced and threw a party, so everyone had better shut up. That was a go-to argument for the right for a while.

I never much worried about Al Qaeda getting out their rabbit ears and watching C-SPAN. However, unquestionably leaders in Europe read our newspapers and consume our media. And when political leaders run a steady diet of pants-pissing missives about the big bad Guantanamo super-villains and how they can never set foot on US soil, small wonder that Europe, a key player in the White House's efforts to find settlements for detainees scheduled for release, wants no part of them either.

The Obama administration's push to resettle at least 50 Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Europe is meeting fresh resistance as European officials demand that the United States first give asylum to some inmates before they will do the same.

Rising opposition in the U.S. Congress to allowing Guantanamo prisoners on American soil has not gone over well in Europe. Officials from countries that previously indicated they were willing to accept inmates now say it may be politically impossible for them to do so if the United States does not reciprocate.

"If the U.S. refuses to take these people, why should we?" said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of the German Parliament from Bavaria, where the White House wants to relocate nine Chinese Uighur prisoners. "If all 50 states in America say, 'Sorry, we can't take them,' this is not very convincing."

The scaremongering has legs, you see, and politicians everywhere being of a spineless nature, they don't want to face their constituents and explain why released Gitmo prisoners are terrorist masterminds to every portion of America but just fine for their country.

Funny how the same people who shrieked that Democrats were "making us less safe" with their words are now causing an international incident through deliberate lying and severely damaging an American President's efforts to improve foreign relations, huh? I guess politics doesn't end at the water's edge anymore.

Harry Reid has composed himself and acknowledged that some prisoners would be resettled in US prisons. Hopefully this constant agreement with the latest bedwetting scenario on the right has ended, and we can actually face our allies again.

Stories Of The Tortured

Just a news flash for the 10 people who still think we don't torture, or that the program wasn't widespread policy across all of our detention centers: we do.

(CNN) -- As one of the right-hand men to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was one of the first Taliban leaders arrested when the United States began military operations in Afghanistan.

As a detainee, he was held both at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba -- spending more than three years in Guantanamo before he was released in 2006.

Now free, Zaeef -- who claims he is no longer a Taliban member -- alleges the military engaged in abusive treatment both at Bagram and Guantanamo. He says he is still bitter about his time there. Closing Guantanamo Bay, he told CNN, is only part of the justice those detained there deserve.

"It was a bad stain on American history," he said. "If they are closing Guantanamo for justice, they have to bring the people who are torturing people, who abuse people, to justice."

The military has classified those like Zaeef as "enemy combatants," although the Justice Department in March said it would dispose of that classification. The U.S. military in Afghanistan said it was not authorized to comment on Zaeef's or any other individual case.

"I didn't see a worse situation in my life than Bagram," recalled Zaeef. "They were beating me, they put me in the snow, in the cold, until I was unconscious."

Zaaef didn't "return to jihad," as the New York Times put it, but he certainly expressed how those beaten and tortured in custody would come out of that seeking revenge, even if they had no Islamist tendencies beforehand. Hard to say that these people "returned" to the fight. This is what former elite interrogator "Matthew Alexander" (a pseudonym) means when he says that torture cost us thousands of American lives and created far more terrorist attacks than it stopped.

"At the prison where I conducted interrogations," responded Alexander, "we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."

Read the story, too, of Lakhdar Boumediene, picked up off the street and falsely accused of terrorism, held at Guantanamo Bay and questioned about events about which he didn't know anything, stuck with a feeding tube and force-fed through a nostril for TWO YEARS, and finally released in Paris when the government had to admit they had no proof. He's a strong man that just wants his quiet life back.

This is why even David Petraeus understands the counter-productive nature of torture. It destroys our ideals and debases our values. It creates a recruiting tool for terrorists and leaves our own troops open to attack and abuse. As a practical matter as well as a matter of law, it makes no sense.

Ben Nelson Looks Forward To Learning

A noncommital, tepid response to the Supreme Court announcement by the Senate's most conservative Democrat:

"President Obama is to be commended for selecting a nominee with a significant breadth and depth of legal experience to replace retiring Justice David Souter. I look forward to learning more about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's background, record and qualifications -- and to meeting with her to discuss her judicial philosophy -- as this important United States Supreme Court nomination moves forward. "During my tenure as Nebraska's governor, I appointed 81 judges, including the entire Nebraska Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. As Nebraska's senator since 2001, I have voted on numerous judicial nominees. In each case, I nominated or supported judicial nominees who convinced me they would follow the law, rather than manipulate the law to promote an activist agenda. While my personal views differed from some nominees, I applied no litmus test to them on issues. My main test has always been and remains: Will the nominee follow the law and not make law to fit his or her views?

"Concerning Judge Sotomayor's nomination, I look forward to examining her entire record and commitment to upholding the law and Constitution of the United States in the coming weeks."

This actually represents a step forward for Nelson, who over the weekend said that Gitmo shouldn't be closed and torture's OK with him. Brian Beutler has a bunch more. Nelson has seen the vacuum for a moderate that can hijack the Presidential agenda and stepped right into it - giving himself a lot of glory and cable news appearances. He's like a force of nature, as well as a creature of the peculiar institution of the Senate.

Media Enablers

Many are justifiably angry at the Democrats for enabling the stupid Republican bedwetting about real live terrorists coming to American maximum security prisons. But the media plays right along with this fearmongering and enables it to a frightening degree.

The front page headline in yesterday's New York Times blared: 1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds. Disturbing! Although how this would reflect on the Obama Administration and not the one who released all these "jihadists" is an open question.

Problem is, the Times and other outlets have run this story before. And scratching just an inch beneath the surface always reveals there's no actual evidence for the claim. The last time such a report was released, back in January, the Pentagon got caught including among those who had "returned to the fight" former detainees who wrote newspaper editorials criticizing US policy.

Meanwhile, the writer herself is disavowing the story in an interesting way.

New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller is now casting doubt on the claim in her front page story today, pounced on by the right and quickly picked up on cable, that one in seven detainees released from Guantanamo "returned to terrorism or militant activity."

Appearing on MSNBC today, Bumiller said "there is some debate about whether you should say 'returned' because some of them were perhaps not engaged in terrorism, as we know -- some of them are being held there on vague charges."

Aside from the fact that the Pentagon has no real statistics on this (they don't tag the detainees they release), there's what Bumiller alludes to here, which is that seven years unjustly detained in a confined cell probably makes you at least open to hating the United States, whether you were a "terrorist" beforehand or not.

The Times actually changed their lede in online editions, but of course not in the paper - and cable news ran with their headline yesterday. The Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet has no problem with this:

I think Elisabeth answered it properly in this interview. Reading some of the criticism it seems that people are saying it undercut the story. It did not. The story was about the estimate of the number of people who ended up, by DOD"s account, as being engaged in terrorism or militant activity after leaving Gitmo. That still stands. The change was an acknowledgment that some assert that not everyone in Gitmo is truly a terrorist. Some critics have said that Gitmo is also filled with people who aren't truly terrorists.

Anyone who is reading a significant retreat in the story, or as us somehow saying the story is wrong is looking for politics where it ain't.

The point is this: traditional media outlets have abetted the blatantly false argument that the "worst of the worst" sit in cells at Gitmo and must never be set free. This not only serves Republican ends as they cling to an issue to get a victory for themselves, but serves the White House, as they try and make this distinction of suspects who can neither be tried or released. Once again, the forces of the status quo and the media megaphone are uniquely aligned.

Time To Drop Drone Strikes On Manhattan, I Guess

Four terrorist plotters in a home-grown cell were captured in New York City last night after threatening to blow up synagogues and shoot down aircraft. They were never far along in their plot, and the FBI and NYPD had them surveilled and sussed out the entire time. That's how terrorism is properly defeated, through effective law enforcement and intelligence.

I suppose that now, based on conservative theories about terrorism policy, we should 1) invade New York City because otherwise we are allowing terrorists safe havens, 2) immediately ship these dangerous home-grown terrorists to Guantanamo or a floating plastic island because our Supermax prisons cannot possibly handle them, and 3) start torturing them immediately just to see if they know anything about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Peter King, a charter member of FEAR Unit, lies to the New York Times, meanwhile, claiming that somehow this terror cell consisted of "jailhouse converts," an effort to demonize our prisons as breeding grounds for terrorism or something. And somehow, that means we can't close Guantanamo. I don't get the point. But maybe I'm not supposed to - there is no point other than using "jailhouse" and "terrorism" in the same sentence.

The Speech Is Not Enough

President Obama made a nice speech today, defending his national security policies and the theory that we should not shrink from our values in a maelstrom of fear. He stood at the National Archives, in front of the founding documents, and acted as a defender of them.

And that's great. Obama made quite a few excellent points, about the closure of Guantanamo, the need for checks and balances and vigorous oversight from the other branches of government, and the failure of the previous Administration to keep faith with our values.

Bully. Wonderful.

I'm pretty much done with talk. On these issues in particular, I will look to the actions of the Administration to make determinations on their success or failure in my eyes. And those actions are likely to fail as much as they succeed. Obama basically acknowledged this. I think this was the key moment in the speech, the moment where Obama tried to position himself as offering some wise middle path and marginalizing "absolutists" on either side of him:

We see that, above all, in how the recent debate has been obscured by two opposite and absolutist ends. On one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: "anything goes." Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants - provided that it is a President with whom they agree.

Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right. The American people are not absolutist, and they don't elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems. They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty, and care, and a dose of common sense. That, after all, is the unique genius of America. That is the challenge laid down by our Constitution. That has been the source of our strength through the ages. That is what makes the United States of America different as a nation.

When he talks here about absolutists, I can only assume he's talking about those of us who believe that no prisoner should be held indefinitely without charges, who believe that there need not be a military courts process outside the one used on our own soldiers, with all of the agreed-upon safeguards and rules for acquiring justice over 200-plus years, who believe that people described vaguely as "supporters" of criminal activities are not as culpable as the criminals themselves and cannot be held without legitimate charges, who believe that the government should not be able to assert state secrets as a means solely to shut down accountability by the judicial branch. If that makes me an extremist, cue the Barry Goldwater line about extremism in the defense of liberty being no vice. I'm simply articulating Constitutional principles, much like the human rights groups who met with Obama yesterday have articulated for many years. And I come out of this speech with a similar reaction to one of the participants in that discussion.

Asked whether the president had pacified some of the concerns she brought to the White House on Wednesday, (Human Rights First CEO Elisa) Massimino said that she was pleased with the opportunity for engagement. Beyond that, she still registered concerns.

"I think that many of us were disappointed by the announcement about the military commissions and wondered what the reasoning was behind that. And to be honest, I am still wondering having been in this meeting today. I don't think that this fits the overall framework that the president had articulated about using our values to reinforce a counter terrorism strategy against al Qaeda."

Obama seems committed to providing a durable framework for future Presidents to deal with these issues, and seems committed to a robust process of oversight to allow for a full examination of whether the policies are consistent with Constitutional principles. And then he throws out something like the military commissions revival or hints about preventive detention (literally, the pre-crime process from Minority Report) and you wonder if this is the same person. The actions have not matched the rhetoric, at least not always.

Now, as a token of some sort, the US government will prosecute Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was allegedly involved in the bombing of US Embassies in Africa in 1998, in a New York City courtroom. That's consistent with our criminal justice system and the proper method of dealing with terrorist activity. It lends credibility to the process and shows that the United States is serious about joining the community of law-abiding nations again. But one token is not enough. And I will continue to fight for civil liberties as long as I see them being abused.

Now, Dick Cheney crawled out of the primordial ooze and I'm supposed to be watching his speech today as well. Here's my only response to that.