The Largest Minority

July 9th, 2009 by Guest

Spencer Ackerman yesterday attended a Senate hearing at which the DOD’s General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, testified. As Ackerman highlighted, Johnson actually said that even for those detainees to whom the Obama administration deigns to give a real trial in a real court, the President has the power to continue to imprison them indefinitely even if they are acquitted at their trial. About this assertion of “presidential post-acquittal detention power” — an Orwellian term (and a Kafka-esque concept) that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares at all about the most basic liberties — Ackerman wrote, with some understatement, that it “moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective.” Law professor Jonathan Turley was more blunt: “The Obama Administration continues its retention and expansion of abusive Bush policies — now clearly Obama policies on indefinite detention.”

In June, Robert Gibbs was repeatedly asked by ABC News’ Jake Tapper whether accused Terrorists who were given a trial and were acquitted would be released as a result of the acquittal, but Gibbs — amazingly — refused to make that commitment. But this is the first time an Obama official has affirmatively stated that they have the “post-acquittal detention” power (and, to my knowledge, the Bush administration never claimed the power to detain someone even if they were acquitted).

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.

In today’s Wall St. Journal, which also reported that “the Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges,” Rep. Jerry Nadler was quoted as saying something quite similar about the Obama approach:

“What bothers me is that they seem to be saying, ‘Some people we have good enough evidence against, so we’ll give them a fair trial. Some people the evidence is not so good, so we’ll give them a less fair trial. We’ll give them just enough due process to ensure a conviction because we know they’re guilty. That’s not a fair trial, that’s a show trial,” Mr. Nadler said.

Exactly. Show trials are exactly what the Obama administration is planning. In its own twisted way, the Bush approach was actually more honest and transparent: they made no secret of their belief that the President could imprison anyone he wanted without any process at all. That’s clearly the Obama view as well, but he’s creating an elaborate, multi-layered, and purely discretionary “justice system” that accomplishes exactly the same thing while creating the false appearance that there is due process being accorded. And for those who — to justify what Obama is doing — make the not unreasonable point that Bush left Obama with a difficult quandary at Guantanamo, how will that excuse apply when these new detention powers are applied not only to existing Guantanamo detainees but to future (i.e., not-yet-abducted) detainees as well?

Whatever else is true, even talking about imprisoning people based on accusations of which they have been exonerated is a truly grotesque perversion of everything that our justice system and Constitution are supposed to guarantee. That’s one of those propositions that ought to be too self-evident to need stating.

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June 19th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Delivering a sermon during Friday prayers at Tehran University, Khamenei backed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the president after the June 12 election.

“Candidates were put forward into public eye, everyone could judge for themselves … they have identified the person they wanted,” he said.

Khamenei refuted accusations of vote rigging, and insisted the poll was an “absolute and definitive victory”.

Ruling out fraud behind Ahmadinejad’s victory, he said “the Islamic establishment will never manipulate people’s votes and commit treason.

“The legal structures and electoral regulations of this country do not allow vote rigging.”

He said that any doubts concerning the results must be investigated through legal channels and called on supporters of defeated candidates to cease street protests, adding, “otherwise they will be responsible for its consequences, and consequences of any chaos”.

Farzad Agha, an Iranian analyst, told Al Jazeera: “This clearly is a threat to the demonstrators and supporters of the opposition candidates … He is saying that if you continue we will deal with you.”

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June 18th, 2009 by Guest

More bullshit from the party that convinced Americas the rule of law would be restored if they were given your vote. The picture below may remind you of another wiretapping crook, but this crime is actually a hundred times worse than Watergate.

The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee came to the defense of the National Security Agency today, saying that the federal agency didn’t commit flagrant abuses in its program to intercept American’s phone calls and emails — but stopped short of denying that the agency had overstepped its bounds or broken the law.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) responded to comments made by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, in a New York Times story, that he was ”increasingly troubled by the agency’s handling of domestic communication.”

The Times reported that the NSA’s “recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged,” and that that there are “legal and logistical difficulties” with the Agency’s monitoring of domestic communications.

The NSA has the “ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis,” the Times said — even though the agency’s mandate is to monitor communications between the U.S. and foreign points.

“Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental,” Holt told the newspaper.

In a hearing today, Sen. Feinstein said: “Everything that I know so far indicates that the thrust of this story — that there are flagrant actions to collect content of this collection [sic] — just simply is not true to the best of my knowledge.”

According to the Associated Press, Holt is standing by his remarks to the Times. His spokesperson, Zach Goldberg, confirmed today that the House Representative had “nothing to add or retract.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) of the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized Attorney General Eric Holder, for refusing to declare that the warrantless wiretapping program started under the Bush administration is against the law. Holder testified before the committee today.

“I was disappointed by Attorney General Holder’s unwillingness to repeat what both he and President Obama had stated in the past – that President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal,” Feingold said in a statement. “For an administration that has repeatedly stated its intention to restore the rule of law, this episode was a step backward.

“While the Attorney General restated his belief that the program was inconsistent with the FISA statute, his testimony today, and the administration’s delay in withdrawing the Bush Administration’s legal justifications for the program, are troubling,” Feingold said.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department said it had limited the NSA’s practice of monitoring domestic communications.

source

June 16th, 2009 by Guest

originally posted at Lenin’s Tomb

I think it’s a consensus on the liberal-left in the US and UK that the Iranian elections were fixed. If they are right, we are watching a bloodless coup turn into a bloody one, as protesters have been beaten and are now being shot at and killed by cops. One of Mousavi’s supporters alleges he was told that a coup was coming. If they are not right, we are still faced with a state busily beating and killing the opposition. The Iranian state is still detaining ‘reformist’ MPs, censoring newspapers, shutting down access to social networking sites (although people are still finding ways to Twitter), and behaving as if for all the world it had every reason to act guiltily. It is not inherently implausible that Ahmadinejad got 63% of the vote, and it has to be shown that there was a fix. The fact that Ahmadinejad used state oil revenues to fund programmes for the poor can be approved or derided, but it arguably gave large numbers of people an interest in voting for Ahmadinejad against his more explicitly neoliberal rival. It gave him a base among some of the working class and bazaaris. Still, it is hardly implausible either that some vote-rigging went on, if only to make the win decisive enough to avoid a run-off.

So, the first question that occurs is, why should the ballots be rigged? This is skated over in a lot of the commentary as if the answer were obvious - Mousavi advocated reform, duh! However, Mousavi is hardly a dangerous candidate for the Iranian ruling class: rather, he represents a powerful faction of it. True, he was once on the ‘Islamic Left’ back in the 1980s, and it was due to the support of the left-leaning majles that he was made prime minister against Khomeini’s preferences. Today, however, he is a centrist allied to the ‘Modern Right’. His solutions to Iran’s problems of accumulation and development are impeccably neoliberal. This is why he got the backing of the old crook, cynic, capitalist and Iran-Contra arms dealer, Hashem Rafsanjani. He supports privatization, and wants to reform Article 44 to assist the process. He supports strong counter-inflationary policies. Of course, he would like to take a slightly less ‘hard line’ with respect to the US. Indeed, like other would-be ‘reform’ candidates, his campaign tried to channel Obama - with some success since his wife, who spearheaded some important reforms in the late 1980s, was cast as the Michelle Obama of the campaign. Still, he isn’t an outsider by any means. His candidacy wasn’t struck off, while those that offend the Council of Guardians usually are. He wasn’t excluded from the debates, as far as I can find out. He wasn’t excluded from the polls, some of which put him ahead, and some behind. Why should he have suddenly become so dangerous that the Iranian state, or powerful sectors within it, would risk a stupid fix? The answer could only be that by tapping a popular demands for reforms, the candidacy might have unleashed a movement that seriously frightened some factions in the ruling class.

The next question is, what can come of the protests? Whatever the motivations of Mousavi, we have an enormous number of people on the streets, with a clear demand for political reform. They took to those streets, reportedly ignoring warnings that the police were carrying live ammunition. This means they are brave, certainly, and also confident in their numbers. Already, Khamenei has ceded the question of investigating the elections, which it seems clear he didn’t want to do. The Iranian state may kill people, but these protesters are already starting to win. They can make gains far beyond the very limited promises that Mousavi made in order to excite progressive layers. (As far as I can tell, Mousavi was mildly critical of some state repression of television channels, and promised to ‘review’ legislation that could be harmful to women - hardly a tribune of the oppressed). So, whatever the truth about the claims of a fix, these protests can do nothing but good. They may, in addition to getting rid of some particularly onerous forms of oppression, open up a space in which the left can operate more freely, and in which the labour movement can assert itself more forcefully.

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June 14th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

June 9th, 2009 by Guest

A CNN headline, reporting Obama’s plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads “Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.” Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.

Keeping just to Israel-Palestine — there was nothing substantive about anything else — Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to ‘point fingers’ at each other or to “see this conflict only from one side or the other.” There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered.

Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.

Obama once again praised the Arab Peace Initiative, saying only that Arabs should see it as “an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.” How should the Obama administration see it? Obama and his advisers are surely aware that the Initiative reiterates the long-standing international consensus calling for a two-state settlement on the international (pre-June ‘67) border, perhaps with “minor and mutual modifications,” to borrow U.S. government usage before it departed sharply from world opinion in the 1970s, vetoing a Security Council resolution backed by the Arab “confrontation states” (Egypt, Iran, Syria), and tacitly by the PLO, with the same essential content as the Arab Peace Initiative except that the latter goes beyond by calling on Arab states to normalize relations with Israel in the context of this political settlement. Obama has called on the Arab states to proceed with normalization, studiously ignoring, however, the crucial political settlement that is its precondition. The Initiative cannot be a “beginning” if the U.S. continues to refuse to accept its core principles, even to acknowledge them.

In the background is the Obama administration’s goal, enunciated most clearly by Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to forge an alliance of Israel and the “moderate” Arab states against Iran. The term “moderate” has nothing to do with the character of the state, but rather signals its willingness to conform to U.S. demands.

What is Israel to do in return for Arab steps to normalize relations? The strongest position so far enunciated by the Obama administration is that Israel should conform to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, which states: “Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).” All sides claim to accept the Road Map, overlooking the fact that Israel instantly added 14 reservations that render it inoperable.

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May 29th, 2009 by Guest

Consumer activist Ralph Nader has made a significant charge against former Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe — that of attempting to bribe a political foe in order to influence an election result.

Remarkably, McAuliffe, now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of Virginia, is not denying it.

In an upcoming book, Grand Illusion, The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny (The New Press), veteran Nader aide Theresa Amato — who managed his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns — details efforts by McAuliffe, then the DNC chair, to get Nader to stop campaigning in key states. (It’s part of a smart, thorough dissection of what ails the political process, which Phil Donahue hails as “the biggest swing–not a jab, but a roundhouse punch–at America’s corrupt electoral system.”)

The charge is that then-DNC chair McAuliffe offered Nader — who was mounting an independent campaign that some observers thought could pose an electoral threat to the candidacy of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry — an unspecified amount of money, presumably in the form of contribution checks from big donors allied with the Democratic party, to avoid campaigning in 19 battleground states.

Nader confirms that McAuliffe made such an offer.

“When you get a call like that, first of all it’s inappropriate,” the consumer activist told The Washington Post.

Nader says he immediately refused the money. “(If) you don’t immediately say ‘no,’ it’s like taffy, you get stuck with it,” he explained.

That’s the appropriate response to the offer of an old-fashioned political bribe — and, make no mistake, paying a political rival to pull his punches is just that.

So what does the former DNC chair who now seeks to serve as governor of Virginia have to say for himself?

“McAuliffe isn’t denying the charge,” says Post writer Anita Kumar.

In fact, quite the opposite.

Elisabeth Smith, a spokeswoman for McAuliffe, sounds like she is confirming the charge when says her boss “was concerned that Ralph Nader would cost John Kerry the election as he did Al Gore in 2000 and give us another four years of George W. Bush.”

Then she took a shot at Nader, suggesting there was no reason to be concerned about the issue.

“It looks like Ralph Nader misses seeing his name in the press,” Smith griped. “Terry’s focused on talking with Virginians about jobs, not feeding Ralph Nader’s ego.”

Nice spin.

But it does not get to the heart of the matter.

McAuliffe is asking the Democrats of Virginia to nominate him for a position of public trust. If he does not have a better explanation than the one that has so far been offered, there can and will be serious questioning of whether he’s got that ought to be expected of major-party nominee and a governor.

source

May 27th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Any speech in which President Obama announces a change in policy follows the same basic format of denouncing Bush’s policy, taking long thoughtful pauses, then adopting Bush’s policy.

When I was campaigning for Nader, on the rare occasion that I would meet a self-described liberal calm enough to engage in a conversation with me, they would state that they were voting for Obama because they didn’t want a clone of George W. Bush (meaning John McCain) to win the White House. I would often reply that I wasn’t voting for either McCain or Obama for the very same reason. Both men were outright fascists. Of course, stating something like that would often end the conversation. What an absurd thing to say. Right?

h/t FireDogLake