I know most of you don’t want to read this, and it’s fairly long, so I’m going to put this behind a cut. The subject: the problem of terror has, in the past few weeks, gotten qualitatively worse in a way that it hasn’t since 9/11.
Was the Constitution written in vain?
MSNBC is reporting that Tom Ridge wants to suspend the election in November if a terror attack occurs near that time.
Comment
Quick news updates:
We just transferred sovereignty to Iraq two days early. Bremer left the country shortly afterwards. Surprise! (Ulp)
In three decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees of various sorts have the right to judicial review by the courts. (Important!)
The Supreme Court also agreed to hear a medical marijuana case.
And “Fahrenheit 9/11” has set various box office records, including top grossing documentary, and interestingly enough has been selling out theatres in Republican strongholds. The overall meaning of this is still a bit unclear, but people certainly seem interested in seeing it.
Things worth reading
Three important things from the news:
- The Washington Post has posted the full text of the DoJ memo suggesting how torture of detainees abroad “may be justified,” along with some related memoranda and transcripts of recent press conferences and senate hearings of interest. All very interesting reads.
- Next Monday, at 0630 PDT, the SpaceShipOne will attempt to become the first private manned spacecraft. It looks like it will probably work. (Knock on wood!) This is very possibly the coolest single thing on the planet at this time.
- And on a related note, on July 1st, the Cassini-Huygens probe is scheduled for orbit insertion around Saturn. Its route will take it straight through the rings, going through the F-G gap, then up close by the planet (snapping pictures all the time) and into an elliptical orbit. This is going to be extremely neat.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Bloody hell…
Some “administration lawyers,” to be none to specific, apparently opined in a March 2003 confidential memo that the President is bound neither by international treaties nor federal laws regarding torture, and that any such prohibition “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority.” (News story)
Phrased another way, torture is permissible so long as it’s for interrogation purposes and done for ultimately military purposes.
Or to highlight the obvious inference, the president is above all laws, federal, state, or international treaties, so long as he argues that his actions are in some way, shape or form pursuant to his duty as CiC of the armed forces.
Apparently this wasn’t a sole memo – there was a chain of them, largely prepared for Rumsfeld, used to justify activities first at Guantánamo, then in Afghanistan, and finally in Iraq. Much of its basis was an earlier memo (22 Jan 2002) from the Justice Department on arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes.
Where the hell does our administration find these people? And have they lost their minds completely? Are they completely unaware of what happens when a leader or a military places itself above the law, above the Constitution, and above civil society?
(And let me state, for the record: I believe that commanders need a great deal of flexibility to deal with situations in war, especially nonconventional war. But decisions such as the use of torture cannot be unilateral and immune to judicial and legal review, and the President cannot demand blanket exemption from American law for any reason whatsoever.)
New story on Abu Ghraib (Worth reading)
Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker has a new story on how the entire Abu Ghraib incident came to pass. The story relies a great deal on background sources, so it’s got to be read carefully with a skeptical eye – but it smells more or less right to me.
Quote from our President:
(Last Tuesday, at a rally in Cincinnati:) “You’ve got to get out there and turn out the vote… that’s what we call the grass roots. I’ve come to fertilize the grass roots.”
This is what we call an “unfortunate metaphor.”
Your other odd headlines for the day
Bush’s Medicare dream turning into a nightmare (Skullduggery w.r.t. the recent Medicare reform bill)
SCO takes on US government’s supercomputers (SCO has decided to sue the Department of Energy for using Linux, too. This legal strategy is getting increasingly…. umm. right.)
Intelligence aide claims Bush ignored al-Qaeda (Former national counter-terrorism adviser for every administration from Reagan through the younger Bush has a new book out and appeared on 60 minutes, accusing Bush of systematically refusing to heed warnings about al-Qaeda and being interested only in Iraq)
Royal Dutch/Shell Restates Again (Your next major financial scandal in the works)
A potentially serious matter (Domestic politics)
On 4 Feb, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force got a judge to issue a subpoena to Drake University in Iowa for all records associated with an anti-war protest held there on 15 Nov. (story, stora) The subpoena, issued under seal by US District Judge Longstaff, includes specific requests for all records regarding the protest leaders.
According to attornies from the National Lawyer’s Guild and the ACLU, this is the first such subpoena in several decades. (As a side note: These subpoenas were especially common during the 1960s, and were a particular favorite even before then of J. Edgar Hoover. Their primary purpose then was to assemble dossiers against political subversives and enemies of various administrations.)
The seriousness of this matter is, I hope, clear. The issuing of subpoenas of any sort, even for purely “informational purposes,” against demonstrators is designed and intended to have a chilling effect on speech; it is a specific act of the Justice Department to subdue ordinary political dissent. The subpoena has been challenged in court and hopefully will not stand.
In another matter, there was this story about investigations within the DoD. I can’t even begin to explain how furious this makes me. If any of these allegations are substantiated, these are matters for general courts-martial and the penalties which only they can provide; it brings into question the performance of the entire chain of command in any place where it happened, and of who allowed a circumstance to arise in which such a thing could even be conceivable. I only hope that all levels involved in this understand just how serious a matter this is.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 