Perhaps the winds of change are blowing through the District of Columbia, for a change. Professor Manfred Nowak has spoken publicly about his belief that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld should be brought before a court because of the conditions of imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. A video of an interview with CNN's Rick Sanchez is posted for context below.
For those readers unfamiliar with the various levels of complicity, such as John Ashcroft's infamous quote, Condoleeza Rice's admission, or Dick Cheney's admission from Taxi to the Dark Side, a few highlights are presented below by liberal pundit Rachel Maddow, for a quick brief.
To summarize the argument even further into condensed legal flavor, Article 4 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment compels member states to prosecute allegations of torture, casting a wide net to catch everyone between the interrogator to those who knew about it and did nothing, in theory. The Text is quoted below.
1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture. 2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
This, to state the obvious, is the largest test of the new administration. How will Obama handle these allegations? I hope this is a question that is being asked again in the White House and in various agencies of the Federal Government, to the logical conclusion that these allegations must be investigated as a matter of legitimacy. How the Rule of Law is enforced will set the tone, as it a lack of credible enforcement of the law as it is written set the tone of the Bush Administration. Simply issuinga subpoena to former officials will not work, just ask Karl Rove. There can be no pleading and begging for a notionally independent branch of government for morsels of information and the respect due such an august body. Flaunting of Congressional subpeonas must stop, and the words of the anointed, yet not confirmed, Attorney General, Eric Holder, are encouraging, if unsettling to certain people, such as Alberto Gonzalez. Unfortunately for the shamed former AG seems to rest precariously on the words of John Yoo, former counselor in the Bush Administration's Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.
With the new year and the change of administration in Washington there has been a tendency lately for retrospective looks at the outgoing Bush administration which has reminded us of all that has gone wrong in the last eight years and all that the Bush administration and its collaborators have to answer for. This tendency has in turn provoked the apologists for the Bush regime who are now using the unitary executive theory as a shield rather than a spear. The result is conversations like the one on the Diane Rehm show this morning where lawyers acting as apologists for the nefarious acts of Bush policy sound like panicky weasels trying to slip out of anyone having to take responsibility for the wrongs they have done. These pundits try to appear to be centrists, but the way they use arguments regarding pragmatic politics to evade moral accusations that there has been wrongdoing on the part of the Bush administration paints these men as the worst caricature of the sleazy lawyer.
This article details some of the absurdity of the Maryland terrorism list wherein peaceful people who never committed any crime and never planed to do so were labeled as terrorists. Remember, people still claim that the president has the power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen living in the United States after merely labeling them an enemy combatant. A term the government was unable to define even at the Supreme Court. Also remember that the people detained as enemy combatants are tortured prior to determination of guilt or complicity in any criminal act.
We don't have any examples yet of someone being detained and tortured merely for exercising their First Amendment rights by expressing a liberal opinion and hopefully we will never see any. This is still the danger we have to be aware of when a government takes these kinds of powers for itself. The above article details how intelligence that repeatedly says these people were not dangerous leads to them being labeled as terrorists and in many cases misidentifies what these people were involved with and where they were. If these cops really thought these people were terrorists and a danger to the country I would hope that they would be more careful with the information they gather so as to actually know where someone was on a certain day rather then place them on the opposite side of the continent. Here we are seven years after 9/11 and we still haven't learned the lessons about putting quality people between us and the enemy and not wasting time and taxpayer dollars on witch hunts.
I am not a citizen of California, so I have not been following the news surrounding Prop. 8. I don't even know the technical wording of what it does. I recently read this article, and it reminded me of something I have tried to address in previous postings. The idea that there can be a status equivalent to marriage for homosexuals that simply uses a different word. I have explained before that separate is not equal and that there are technical differences in the law that would be difficult to account for in creating a parallel civil institution.
I would like to try to address the underlying argument that if homosexuals are allowed to marry it somehow damages the sacred unions of heterosexual marriage. To me this seems like saying that every time I have a bacon cheeseburger, it harms every Jew that keeps kosher. Sure they might feel left out at a BBQ, but bacon is still delicious. OK, so the analogy needs work. I have yet to hear any reasoned argument behind the bare assertion, other than a veiled suggestion that the purpose of marriage is to produce future taxpayers. That upsets me as a Libertarian, but as a moral human being this concept throws me into a foaming rage that a human child is being valued only as a walking wallet. I think it shows that these people who claim to be for morality and the family are really the most cynical and selfish, if you only press them beyond their memorized talking points.
Personally I find it hard to argue with Mormons on the issue of family because they have such a strong family ethos and make it a central tenant of their religion. My bone of contention with them is that their conception of "family" is so narrow, it excludes and even rejects some of the diversity on Earth and in society that must be a part of God's plan. A faith that has a de facto exclusion of the childless and infertile, and an outright hostility to homosexual families seems to me to be directly rejecting the spark of divinity inherent in every part of God's Creation.
There have been some gains for freedom and for the American people lately that have been overshadowed by the free fall in the stock market. The important thing is that these small steps show that our system still works, even if it draws its inspiration from molasses.
The Justice Department has completed its investigation into the firings of the nine U.S. attorneys and decided that since the Bush administration refused to cooperate with its investigation, Justice would appoint a special investigator. Whether this new investigator will have the power to get the information required to get to the bottom of this remains to be seen, and whether any power given will be effective is a whole other question.
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered the release of the Uighers into the United States. What is significant about this ruling is that last part about being released into the U.S. These are Chinese Muslims that were captured in Pakistan during the early days of the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. government has not considered them "enemy combatants" for some time now but will not release them into the United States and will not send them back to China. So the Government has been looking for, and failing to find, any country that will take them in. As with any promising ruling, there are still many appeals to go through.
Finally some real news. Judge William R. Wilson Jr., the judge who sent Echol's appeal back to Arkansas State court has recused himself. A second article provides some details of Jason Baldwin's appeal based on the argument that his lawyer represented him poorly during the original trial. The quoted text seems like Paul Ford, Baldwin's original defense lawyer, is cooperating in a genuine attempt to get an innocent man out of prison, and is doing so without hubris.
Judge Burnett denied the request for a new trial for the WM3. He sided with the prosecution who argued that there being no DNA evidence at the crime scene did not prove the innocence of the convicted. Though if the Paradise Lost documentaries are to be believed there was no actual evidence connecting the three to the crime in the first place. If I understand the process correctly, the next step is to appeal to the Arkansas Supreme court and then to federal court. Unfortunately this could go on for some time.
That guy that was tazered on his own couch by the cops that broke into his apartment and continued to tazer him after he identified himself, ya he just got a settlement of $100,000. Too bad that after paying his lawyer and the taxes on that shit he will only see $40,000.
The important thing to remember is the cost of justice. The officers that did this will not face justice for their actions but the taxpayers of this burrow will be the ones that have to pay for the actions of the persons that they have stuffed into uniform. This is why every individual in the community should care about the quality of the police officers on their streets.
This article doesn't really offer anything new other than dates for the new hearings. I admire the press for holding interest even with the gag order which prevents the attorneys from speaking with the media. But I find my distaste for them increased by their repeating that the three were accused of being satanist. This is untrue and merely sensationalizes the story and promotes ignorance.
Earlier this week I was thinking about the racism that is frequently concealed within anti-terrorism rhetoric. Particularly among Fox pundits. People are so willing to forget that Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the Anthrax scare was perpetrated by a white American. Then I came across this story which recounts that the Bush administration tried to get the FBI to ignore the whole investigation thing and blame it on al Quaeda. You know, because they care about security. The images are mostly things i have come across on the Internet related to 9/11 and making light of the situation. The one with the Muppet's was a joint creative venture between Th'Dave and APPhilosophy.
That's what they used to call Wal-Mart where I grew up. I worked for Wal-Mart for two years in various departments so I know first hand about their anti-union practices, among other things. When I was first hired I was taken into the HR office where I was shown some orientation videos. These were poorly written propaganda where the opinion the company wished you to have was told to you with the not so subtle undertone that your job depended on not openly disagreeing. Mostly these videos cheered how great the founder was and how powerful and efficient the company is. Next they claimed that the dead-end job you were hired into was a golden ticket to the high life as long as you keep your head down and keep your mouth shut. The most inelegant of the propaganda videos was the anti-union video. It laid out Wal-Mart's corporate line on unions: unions will lie to you, you will pay huge dues and loose all your company benefits, unions don't help workers they are just out to run national political campaigns that are against your best interest. Even as a kid the threat wasn't lost on me. Wal-Mart was saying directly to each new hire, if you try to unionize we will take away the meager benefits we have graciously seen fit to give you. Any idiot could see that the benefits were terrible, dead peasant insurance and health care that only the management could afford. Wal-Mart is so anti union that they even closed a store where the employees voted to unionize in order to prevent the unions from getting a foot hold in the company. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article detailing how Wal-Mart warned its employees against voting Democratic this fall while matching that with a renewed parroting of the company line against unions. The funny thing is that these speeches are probably the first thing most of these employees heard about the Free Choice Act. From my experience working at Wal-Mart the people there aren't particularly political and would have to be pretty fed up with working there to even be considering the union option enough to know about the Free Choice Act. I know its the first I have heard of it and extra publicity for the act is probably the last thing Wal-Mart wanted. What can you expect from a company that has such an unrefined propaganda machine?
It is repeated many places on the log cabin so I wont go into much detail here but it is important to recount what is bad about Wal-Mart. The low prices at Wal-Mart aren't from some magic that Sam Walton pulled out of his ass. Lowering prices to out perform your competition is an old tactic. the problem with it is that you cant do that forever unless you have some way of making your cost go down. Two ways Wal-Mart saves cost(lowers overhead) is by getting lower prices from manufacturers and reducing labor costs. They cut prices from manufacturers first by buying in huge volume, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world and has the power to negotiate(dictate) their own prices from their suppliers. The problem with this is that the suppliers and manufacturers have their own costs to cover and in order to lower prices they have to close factories in the U.S. and send them overseas. Master lock is one brand this happened to, Wal-Mart also drove the entire television manufacturing industry overseas. This is one way Wal-Mart destroys American jobs and lowers the wage of the American worker. Wal-Mart keeps its labor costs low by paying a wage that is below the poverty level (a living wage in the U.S. is over $11/hour) and offering few benefits and pricing the benefits they do offer out of the reach of their average employees. Then they force the American taxpayer to subsidize their employees by referring them to state and federal well fare programs. Think that over, you are subsidizing Wal-Marts low prices and their astronomical profits with your taxes, whether or not you shop there. At about 4:30 into the video it gives you numbers on this.
When I first started working at Wal-Mart management at the store I worked at would wait till someone punched out at the end of their shift and then tell them to clean up a department before they left. At least they weren'tlocking us in overnight. There was an audit by the government and that practice stopped only to be followed by a tricky hiring practice. The manager didn't hire any full time employees. That alone saved on lunches since an eight hour employee gets two fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch while a four hour employee gets only one fifteen minute break. It also saved on benefits since only full time employees were eligible for them. These new employees were all hired for the lowest paying job in the store and then trained for the jobs that got paid twenty five cents per hour more. That's a small dick in the ass of each employee but twenty five cents an hour for fifty employees over a an eighteen hour business day seven days a week adds up to over $80,000 in labor cost savings a year.
So Wal-Mart comes to town playing its game of dirty pool, drives local businesses out of business, and forces self sufficient former entrepreneurs to work for poverty wages while taking dollars out of the local economy and sending them to their corporate offices in Arkansas and overseas. That's why when people suggest I shop at Wal-Mart I say, "Sorry, I love America too much."
Today U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled that Congress can subpoena members of the Bush administration. Unfortunately this is not the end of the legal philosophy of executive privilege since Bates also ruled that these aids can still invoke executive privilege in response to certain questions.
It is interesting to me that this article by Reuters chose to say that it is the Democrats that claim politics interfered with hiring and firing decisions at the Justice Department when an internal investigation by the Justice Department itself came to the same conclusion this week.
These are all small steps but they are steps on the path that lead to justice and accountability. We may yet falter on the way but it is proof that our system is not broken and still works. Let this be a lesson to all those who vainly spoke of moving to Canada.
That being said, its all well and good to gloat about Bush and the neo-cons who are using him as a vehicle getting their cummupance, but this story has a portion to it that should upset everyone. The problem is that it is buried past the critical first paragraph of most articles. According to the Justice Department's internal report, Monica Goodling the person under Attorny General Alberto Gonzales in charge of hiring, passed over a highly qualified and experienced counter-terrorism attorny because his wife was active in the Democratic Party. Instead she hired a Bush croney who had no experience working with counter-terrorism in any way. So she put political concerns above national security. Its useless to extend this behavior to other Republicans like some are tempted to do. History has shown us that career politicans are corrupt regardless of what party they belong to. The important thing is to be sure that this individual who put all of our lives at risk for her petty concerns takes responsibility for what she has done and faces justice.
Fortunately for bloggers like myself there are real reporters out there doing the hard work like research to produce helpfull things like this. If you have ever been outraged by a Bush asministration supporter and found yourself too flustered to back up your claims that various members of the administration might have possibly violated the law, Slate has decided to help all of us with an interactive chart of who did what.
It may be beating a dead horse to talk about blood diamonds except people are still buying them, the artifical custom of the diamond engagement ring persists, and the average person does not feel blinded by rage when they see a commercial for diamonds. Also, you may be wondering what sparked this posting. I didn't just see the movie Blood Diamond and have my eyes opened to this tragedy and rush out to tell the ten people who accidentally come to this blog every day. I have been pissed about this injustice since I was a little high school hoodlum but I recently stumbled on my notes from last summer regarding this topic and I stumbled on this article on Fark.
That article recounts an older story regarding how the value of diamonds was artificially inflated and bullshit symbolism was imbued into the diamond. It recounts how a common stone with little intrinsic value was kept from the market in order to artificially create a low supply while some clever advertisers associated the diamond with eternity and love and forced every man in western society from then on to spend two months salary on a worthless crystal of carbon for fear of sending the wrong message to the woman he loves. Fortunately, for their trouble, those advertisers will have to crouch in the desert of sodomites for all eternity. Unfortunately love isn't enough to overcome the demands of consumerism in our culture, or informed women who truly loved their future husbands would insist on not wearing murder on their hands. They would not be able to look at their enggement ring and see the love of their husband but would instead witness blood flowing from the stone on their ring, the blood of the children who died in the mines and the men and women who were murdered when a new militia came and took over the mine.
Remember those anti-drug adds just after 9-11 where the Bush administration and John Ashcroft were trying to capitalize on nationalism in the war on drugs? They implied a connection within the drugs trade wherein money American teenagers spent on pot went into the coffers of the terrorists who had attacked us. The same is true of the diamond trade. If you buy diamonds, you are putting money into Osama Bin Laden's pockets.
What about the Kimberly process you ask? What are you some lobbyist for the diamond industry? For the rest of you, the Kimberly process is the method the diamond industry created to pretend they were doing something about blood diamonds as a public relations scheme. The process is entirely voluntary, completely self-administered with no accountability, and there are large financial disincentives to poor african countries to conform rigorously to the process's own loose guidelines. Given the fact that emeralds and rubies come from conflict ridden regions in Colombia and Burma respectively, and the gem industry turns a blind eye to the suffering inflicted on people in those areas, it is unsuprising that their own method of self monitoring the origins of diamonds is far from robust. This is what it looks like when evil people try to do good but can't stop thinking of their own greed.
The Arkansas Supreme Court denied the appeal to reopen the cases of the convicted. The court has refused to hear the newly arisen DNA evidence that indicates the convicted were not at the location commonly believed to be the scene of the crime, and no DNA from the convicted was found on the victims. This leaves open the previously denied federal appeal.
Today the Supreme Court Ruled that the Second Amendment ensures an individuals right to own and possess a firearm. Few people were suprised by this decision. Either in its ultimate result or in its scope. Scalia, who wrote the position for the majority, has previously written opinions for the court in gun control cases that are fundamentally similar to this result. The Court has said in the past that the right enshrined in the second amendment is an individual right but it is not a right without restriction. This can be seen in past cases regarding the federal ban on fully automatic rifles such as in Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600 (1994).
The cases and statutes throughout the United States have created a general guideline that seems to indicate an individual may own as many guns as they wish for recreation, sporting, or self defense, but may not own military equipment, and may be restricted in time and place of usage and transport within reason. The definition of what is military equipment changes frequently as can be seen by the recent expiration of the Brady Bill which forbid removable magazines of a capacity over ten rounds among other things. This most recent ruling not only ensures the individual's right to own and possess firearms, it also sets a line that may not be crossed in restricting type of gun and how it may be possessed and transported. This is because the D.C. gun ban that is overturned forbid ownership of a handgun. The court has clearly declared that this type of restriction violates the Constitution. The law also required registration of other firearms and that those registered firearms be locked when in the home. It is already well settled law that when transpiorting a gun one must have it locked and the ammunition must be locked in a seperate container, but today's Supreme Court ruling seems to indicate that a local law may not require that one keep ones guns locked in ones own home.
The ruling also seems to indicate that legislation requiring registration of firearms also goes to far. Many may not understand why this would be objectionable. After all, you have to register your car. The principle difference there is that there is no constitutionaly protected right to own and operate a vehicle. This is more than just a trite observation. Though a car may seem more essential to one's daily life, Congress may decide one day that cars are too dangerous and too polluting to allow in private ownership and ban them. However possession of a weapon is a right granted to us by our creator, like freedom of speech, and is protected by the Bill of Rights. The second reason to object to registration of firearms is a bit more paranoid. Firearm registration just gives the government a list of what law abiding citizens have guns ans what they have in their arsenal. The fear of armed government agents going door to door with a list and confescating the firearms of law abiding citizens in a time of emergency, when they are more likely to need them, is less paranoid when you remember that it happened and happened recently. When Bush suspended posse comitatus after hurricans Katrina and the national guard confiscated guns from people who were just trying to defend themselves from looters and murders who were roaming the streets after the disaster.
Despite the apparent clarity, the actual bounds of the Supreme Court's decision will be heavily litigated and fought over. The lawsuits have already started. As this article indicates these lawsuits by the NRA were already in the works before the decision came down.
In this image you see President Bush defacing the American Flag in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 700 Destruction of the Flag of the United States. That is the same statute that forbids flag burning. The amusing thing is that flag burning is protected speach under the first amendment but being an arrogant jingoist and writing your name on the flag may not be.
The Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration today. The high Court held that despite what the President and the Neo-Cons say, everyone has natural human rights. A foreign citizen has the same human rights that you and I have under the United States' legal system. A person cannot be drprived of those rights by having a certain lable applied to them such as, terrorist, or enemy combatant. Perhaps the Court realized that such things need to be proven beyond simple conjecture. The court also held that people cannot be imprisoned by the United States for an indeterminate period of time, and that anyone imprisoned must be charged with a crime. You know, basic things that are at the foundation of this country and our system of justice.
The Supreme Court came down on the side of freedom and justice today and has once again renewed my faith in our system of government.
So aparently American Indians are buying up the land that once was theirs. This has become possible recently through the generous donations made by the white man at the native's traditional style gaming longhouses. They are also taking the ironic move of uitilizing a treaty that could only have been a cruel legal kick in the face when it was enacted. After using violence to drive the natives off their lands the U.S. then made it possible for the natives to buy the land back. How generous! Well now the American Indian tribes are using that treaty to take the land they buy out of the tax base of the local municipality it used to belong to and into their own sovjerenty. And OH! to hear the white man cry when you disrupt his tax base!
The thing that pisses me off the most about local governments is that they act as if the land within their boarders and the tax money they expect to bring in is theirs instead of the property of the people they are supposed to serve. Exibit A Now that someone is using the machenery of capitalism and the law to their own advantage and exercising their rights, these local governments cry foul, gnash their teeth, and beat their chests untill the blood comes out. These local government "leaders" need to have a lesson in real American freedom but sadly this is the kind of corruption that infects local government like a festering boil.
In the meantime some crazy fuckers have gone and disturbed a previously uncontacted tribe in the Amazon just to prove they exist. Now droves of anthropologists will stream down there looking for them to figure crap out. Nowhere is Heizenburgs uncertainty principle more appropriately glossed over into a philosophical statement than with regard to anthropology. The presence of the anthropologist that examines the culture alters what he is examining tremendously. All this, and social anthropology can barely call itself a science.
There is a set of common arguments that have as their basis the assumption that morality flows from religion. Any athiest will tell you how foolish this is. One need only look to history to learn the lession that people are terrible regardless of what God they kneel to or whether they believe or not. Something that is frequently overlooked is just how dangerous it is to have faith in religion or the law to make people treat each other well. If someone is not killing you or raping you or not robbing you because they are afraid of God or jail then that person is actually evil. Not only evil but an evil coward.
