Legal Issues

Cops Gone Wild

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:16:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has gone whining to his
professional organization, the Cambridge Police Superior Officers
Assn., asking for support in calling for President Obama to apologize
for saying he acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Gates
after first suspecting the prominent African-American scholar of being
a burglar caught breaking into Gates' own home.

Sgt. Crowley claims he was totally justified in making the arrest on
a charge of "disorderly conduct" (later dropped by the police), because
Gates, who actually had been forced to break into his own home during a
return from a speaking tour in China when the front door was stuck, had
allegedly become "enraged" when the officer confronted him and asked
for identification. Crowley claims that Gates called him names, called
him a racist, and threatened to file a complaint against him, and that
as a result he arrested him.

President Obama said that this arrest, made after Gates had shown
the officer both his Harvard faculty ID and also his drivers license,
showing that he in fact lived in the residence in question, was stupid,
but in truth it was much worse than that. It was a blatant abuse of
power--one that has become all to common, and accepted, in today's
America, where every cop's a "hero"...

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
work is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Living in a Police State: The Gates Incident

dlindorff — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:33:43 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The point about the arrest Monday by a Cambridge Police sergeant of
Harvard Distinguished Professor Henry “Skip” Gates is not that the
police initially thought the celebrated public intellectual, PBS host
and MacArthur Award winner might have been a crook who had broken into
Gates’ rented home. Anyone capable of seeing a 58-year-old man with a
cane accompanied by a man in a tux as a potential burglar might make
the same mistake, given that a neighbor had allegedly called 911 to
report seeing two black men she thought were breaking into the house.

But after Prof. Gates had shown the cops his faculty ID and his
drivers’ license, and had thus verified his identity, and after he had
explained that he had just returned home on a flight from China and had
been getting help from his limo driver in opening a stuck door, the
cops should have been extremely polite and apologetic for having suspected him and for having insisted on checking him out.

After all, a man’s home is supposed to be his castle. When you
violate that sanctity, you should, as a police officer, appreciate that
the owner might be upset.

But where it really goes wrong is what happened next...

For the rest of this story, please to to:

www.thiscantbehappening.net
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment, 2006). He is also author of “Killing
Time” (Common Courage Press, 2003), about the death-penalty case of
Mumia Abu-Jamal, surely one of the most well-known victims of police
abuse of power. Lindorff’s work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Sotomayor's Problem isn't being Too Latina; It's Having Hung with White Suits Too Long

dlindorff — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:16:48 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t know at this point whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a good choice for Supreme Court Justice or a bad one.

She certainly is a lousy judge for writers and other creative
people, having ruled (and been overruled by an appellate court and
then, when that reversal was upheld, by the US Supreme Court in a case
called New York Times Inc. v. Tasini) that the Times and periodical
publishers could reprint, without any additional compensation, any
freelance works they contracted on the basis that they had a general
copyright on each entire issue they publish.

And she appears to have rarely met an insurance company that she
didn’t feel was more deserving of court succor than any insured person
suing an insurer. In a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer,
reporter Joseph N. DiStefano quotes an insurance attorney named Randy
Maniloff as saying that in cases involving insurance companies and
insurance policyholders “It’s insurers by a landslide.” Such a
pro-corporate position would put her in league with the
Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court, and would be consistant
with her pro-corporate stance vis-à-vis writers and artists and
copyright law. (In fairness, Sotomayor did rule against an insurance
firm and in favor of a policyholder’s family in 2005.)

Having said that Sotomayor shows a disturbing pro-corporate stance
in her past rulings, I have to say that the freak-out on the right over
Sotomayor’s comments regarding the impact of her being female and
Latina on her decisions as a jurist is the height of nonsense and
hypocrisy. To watch them frothing, you would think that she was a
latter-day William O. Douglass, which is hardly the case.

What Sotomayor said that has the right in a lather was:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn't lived that life.”

She made that comment at a lecture in Berkeley in 2001, but it came following this earlier statement:

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or
cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and will
make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has
often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will
reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure....that I
agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted,
there can never be a universal definition of wise…”

She went on to note:

“Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and
Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race
discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever
upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case.”

The point is, as long as we have an unequal society, in which some
people are denied equal treatment because of race or religion or
gender, and we clearly have that type of society in America today, the
people from those discriminated-against groups are bound to see the
world in a different way than do most white males.

But the elite—the white male editors and TV commentators, the white
male politicians, and the white male public—don’t see their own
decisions as rooted in their white male expereience. They see their
experience as being “normal” and “unbiased.” It is, to them, only
others who are not “normal” like them who are biased, or or who are
carrying some kind of chip on their shoulders.

What Sotomayor was saying at Berkeley was simply a fact of life: as
a Latina woman, and hopefully as a women who grew up in a poor,
working-class, fatherless family, she is going to view the world
differently than the white male and even black male or white female
colleagues who currently constitute the members of the US Supreme
Court. If this were not so, there would be no need to have women on the
court at all, or African Americans.

That is obviously ridiculous.

White upper-class males on the court for a century saw nothing
wrong with slavery being inflicted on black people, nor did they see
anything wrong with denying the vote to people who didn’t own property.
White males on the court for a century and a half saw nothing wrong
with women not having the vote. For two centuries they saw nothing
wrong with white governments using Jim Crow laws to prevent blacks from
voting, either. (Many of them still see nothing wrong with such legal
obstructionism.)

There are plenty of reasons to oppose President Barack Obama’s
appointment of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court—she is not a particularly
profound Constitutional scholar and she has a record of accommodating
corporate interests at the expense of individuals—but her acknowledging
that being female and Latina may have a positive impact on her judicial
decisions is not one of them.

If she is confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice later this year, as
appears likely, one can only hope that she will allow her decisions to
be informed by that background, and that she will not just become
another one of “the boys” on the bench.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama, Seeing Darkness, Conjures Up the Mists of Time

dlindorff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:56:59 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a
year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the
cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the
distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany
(Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the
terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary
bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air
defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With
Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this
made it an inviting target.

Friends and teachers recounted to me the terrors of that night,
when the entire city of several hundred thousand, built mostly of wood,
went up in a giant bonfire so hot and powerful that it sucked people
into it with a 200 mph vortex of inward rushing air. People who hid in
shelters were asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen, while those who tried
to flee sank knee deep into asphalt streets. Two mountains outside town
were man-made piles of rubble left over from the city’s ruins, which
were for the most part just carted away. There was little left to
rebuild.

While I was stunned by the horror of it, I at the time still felt
that after all, Germans had brought this disaster on themselves. After
all, they had allowed the Nazi monsters to gain control of the nation
and then proceeded with a genocidal campaign of extermination of
Jews—even German Jews who were their own neighbors--of Gypsies, of
gays, and of course, of Communists, and had launched a war that
ultimately killed 10s of millions of people around the world.

I mention all this because one thing I noticed back then, not among
young people in Germany, but among adults my parents’ age and older,
was a widespread denial about what Germany had done. And I remember
feeling, as many Americans and Europeans still do, and as many Chinese
and other Asians still feel about Japan, that these two countries have
never been willing to face up to the crimes that they, as a nation,
permitted to happen in their names.

Older and wiser now, I am well aware that our own country has
committed many crimes, some on a scale approaching those of Germany and
Japan: the near extermination of Native Americans, the mass,
centuries-long enslavement and cultural and physical destruction of
millions of African slaves, the use of nuclear bombs on civilian
targets, the decade-long saturation bombing and herbicidal poisoning of
most of Indochina…

It’s a long and terrible list, and for the most part, in our
schools, in our politics, in our histories, we don’t talk about, and
even justify and deny our own atrocities.

Now we have a president who is perhaps doing something worse.
Admitting that the last administration of President George Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up a program of illegal and inhuman
torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and in the
so-called War on Terror that was launched by them in the wake of the
9-11 attacks in 2001, and offering up documentary evidence of the chain
of command that set the country on this criminal course, President
Obama now says that to move beyond this “dark and painful chapter in
our history,” he will not seek or permit any prosecution of those who
committed torture of captives.

“Nothing will be gained,” Obama said, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

I’m not that concerned about whether individual torturers in the
CIA or the military get prosecuted. If the president had said he would
not prosecute people who “thought” they were acting under proper
authority and behaving legally, but then added that he would pursue
those who authorized and ordered them to torture, I would not have
fussed. But that is not what he said. The implication of his statement,
and the fact that he has not, this far into his term, ordered his
Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to investigate those who were
responsible for the crime, given what he clearly knows about its
authors, is the worst possible of travesties, and rises to the level of
a war crime itself.

Now I don’t want to equate America’s torture of a few hundred or a
few thousand captives by making them endure waterboarding or by placing
plastic neckbands and leashes on them and slamming their heads into
walls, with what the victims of Buchenwald or Auschwitz endured, but
that is really not the issue. The issue is, do we as a nation now
subscribe to the idea that the way to deal with evil perpetrated by
ourselves is to bury it?

Isn’t that precisely what we have been for decades accusing the
Germans and the Japanese of doing: burying in the mists of time their
criminal behavior as a people and as a nation?

And now our president—whose own wife and daughters are descendants
of slave victims of another era of American atrocities—is telling us we
should do the same thing as Germany and Japan: forget and move on.

But the president is wrong. Darkness does not go away when the fog comes. It just gets darker.

Let's shine a light. Sign the petition: No Amnesty for Torturers!

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest work
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under the Law is a Joke

dlindorff — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:09:59 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Last week, a US federal district judge, Henry Kennedy, ruled in
favor of a case brought by the survivors of the crew of the USS Pueblo,
a spy ship captured by the North Korean Navy in 1968, who were held
prisoner by North Korea for 11 months, and who were reportedly tortured
in captivity. The judge awarded the men $65 million in damages from the
state of North Korea.

Now I’m happy for the plaintiffs. Torture is flatly banned under
international law, and nobody should be tortured under any conditions
(whatever Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may think). But let’s
not ignore the irony of this ruling. In general, the federal courts
have been incredibly reluctant about making such rulings against the US
government for doing the same thing that North Korea did, or even worse.

Take the case of Canadian Maher Arar, a telecommunications engineer
of Syrian birth who was nabbed by US intelligence officers in an
airport transit hall at New York’s Kennedy International Airport in
2002 while returning home from a vacation in Tunisia. Arar was held
without a lawyer, interrogated, and then renditioned on a CIA plane to
Syria, where he was handed over to Syrian secret police to be tortured
and interrogated and kept in a basement cell for 11 months. The
brutalized Arar was later released when it was established that he had
no connections to terrorism.

But while Canadian authorities have apologized to Arar, US courts
have so far refused to even allow him to sue the US over his captivity
and torture, accepting the US government’s claim of “national security.”

The contradictions between the handling of these two cases are
striking. In the Pueblo instance, the ship was engaged in spying
activity at a time that the US and North Korea were technically still
at war. The US claims that the crew should not have been captured
because the vessel was allegedly in international waters, though that
actually would be no defense. After all, during wartime, it is common
for navies to sink enemy ships anywhere they find them. (North Korea
insists the ship was inside its territorial waters at the time of
capture.)

Meanwhile, Arar was grabbed by American authorities while
technically outside the US, as he was simply changing planes at Kennedy
and had remained in the international plane changing zone of the
terminal, outside the passport check.

Furthermore, there is no dispute that the Pueblo crew was involved
in military activity at the time of their ship's capture. They were
gathering intelligence on a nation against which the US was at war.
That, of course, does not justify their torture, but it makes their
capture much more legitimate than what happened to Arar.

Arar, after all, was not even arrested. Nor was he involved in any
military or intelligence or even criminal activity. He was simply
kidnapped by American intelligence operatives. He was then renditioned
to a third country, which is itself a crime under international law, to
be tortured, which compounds the felony. And yet he has thus far been
denied the right even to sue the US government for damages. Even if we
were to hand the US government all the benefit of the doubt, and
concede that they might have been acting on false information
suggesting that Arar was an active terrorist, that would still not
justify what they did to him. He should have at least had some kind of
a hearing in US custody, and then, if found to be a likely terrorist,
should have been either held in US custody or deported to his home
country of Canada. He should never, under any circumstances, have been
handed over to the security agency of a third country known to torture
its captives.

And yet Arar is not allowed to sue for the criminal torment he was
put through, while the Pueblo crew is awarded $65 million. (His case is
currently being reconsidered by the full bench of the New York Federal
Court of Appeals, which heard arguments on Dec. 9.)

Nor is he alone. While US courts have agreed that the hundreds of
captives held at Guantanamo Bay and in military brigs in the US in the
so-called “war” on terror have a right to bring their cases before a
federal court, for the most part those courts have shown extreme
deference to the Justice Department and have been upholding the right
of the US government to detain people indefinitely without charge. Even
though it is admitted that many or even most of these captives have
been subjected to torture at the hands of their American captors, they
have not been able to sue for damages. As late as last fall, one
unnamed Guantanamo detainee who sued to require his captors to provide
him with a mattress and a blanket had his case tossed out by a federal
judge, Thomas Hogan, who, astonishingly, ruled that “while the Supreme
Court’s decision in Boumediene gives Petitioner the right to
challenge the fact of his confinement…it says nothing of his right to
challenge the conditions of his confinement.”

Read that again please. A federal judge says he has the full
authority to consider whether a terrorism detainee is being properly
held—which clearly infers that at least some of the hundreds of
detainees in US custody may be improperly held—but he is not allowed to
rule on the conditions of their detention? This would be like saying a
state court has the right to rule on whether a foster child has been
properly assigned to a foster family, but no right to rule on how that
child is being cared for!

A foundation principle of American justice is supposed to be “equal
justice under the law.” Yet here we have a federal judge awarding $65
million to the crew of the spy ship Pueblo, in large part because of
allegations regarding the conditions of their confinement as POWs in
North Korea, while other judges in the same court system have ruled
that a man falsely captured and sent off to be tortured by a foreign
dictatorship’s secret service has no right to even bring his case and
that another cannot has no right to sue to get a mattress to sleep on
or a blanket to keep himself warm!

The promise of equal treatment under the law is honored in the
breach in many ways in courtrooms across America every day, of course,
but in the case of terrorism and POW issues, there isn’t even an
attempt to pretend American courts are fair.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at "www.thiscantbehappening.net

Department of Homeland Lunacy

dlindorff — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:33:10 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I am not a terrorist.

How can I prove this in these paranoid times? Easy. The New York
Department of Motor Vehicles took my $30 payment over the phone to
clear what they said was a record of my NY drivers license having once
been withdrawn, and informed the National Driver Register in Washington
that I’m a good guy deserving of a renewal of my Pennsylvania drivers
license.

Let me explain.

After 9-11, Congress and the Bush Department of Homeland Security
went into overdrive passing things like the USA PATRIOT Act, the
establishment of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to
monitor air passengers and to develop lists of people to harass at air
terminals, a network of black sites to detain and torture suspected
terrorists, and more recently the National Driver Register, a federal
data bank designed to link all drivers licenses and car registrations
to a central computer system, and thus ferret out would be terrorists
trying to create false identities courtesy of the state DMVs.

I, like uncounted tens of thousands of innocent Americans, ran
afoul of this latest catch-a-terrorist system as my Pennsylvania
drivers license, which I first obtained in 1997 when I moved from New
York to Pennsylvania, came up for a third renewal. Several months ahead
of my renewal date, I got a coldly worded and ominous letter from the
Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles saying my license could not
be renewed because the new federal data base was reporting that my New
York license had been “withdrawn” by the NY DMV.

When I called the Pennsylvania DMV to explain that my New York
license had never been withdrawn or suspended (it had to have been in
good order for me to have used it under the state’s reciprocity
agreement with neighboring New York to obtain my new Pennsylvania
license), and to ask what the problem might be, I was told that they
couldn’t tell me, because the federal report doesn’t say what the
problem is. Nor is there any way to contact or appeal to Washington.

My only recourse was to deal with the New York State DMV—probably one of the blackest of bureaucratic black holes known to man.

I called the number that the Pennsylvania DMV provided, and found
myself connected to a maddening automated system which had no options
that could respond to my problem, and that offered no way to reach a
human being. Finally, by calling the media relations office of the
Pennsylvania DMV and using my reporting credentials, I was able to get
someone who could at least check enough into the case with New York to
establish that the problem was that when I moved to Pennsylvania,
transferring my car registration from New York to Pennsylvania, New
York kept my car’s registration active in that state. (I don’t know
what I would have done had I not been a journalist.) Then, since I had
stopped paying for New York car insurance when I switched over to
Pennsylvania plates and Pennsylvania insurance, my New York insurer had
sent in word to the New York DMV saying my car no longer had insurance.

Never mind that my car was by then in Pennsylvania and properly
insured for months before the date that New York showed my car to have
become uninsured. Pennsylvania couldn’t do anything about it because
the federal law says they may not issue me a license as long as there
is a problem with my license in another state. There is no statute of
limitations on any of this, and no method of appeal of the federal
listing.

I called a number that was kindly provided by the media officer in
Pennsylvania, and got through to an actual person in the New York DMV.
She told me that the problem came up because when I moved to
Pennsylvania and shifted my plates over to my new state of residence, I
didn’t send my old license plate to New York. Never mind that there’s
no way I would have known I had to send that plate in. And never mind
that I did obtain a new title for the car in Pennsylvania, and that the
record of that title transfer is in the national computer system. Any
cop with a computer could find that out. Never mind. Eleven years after
the fact, New York still needed the plates.

Of course, I’d long since sold that car for junk and didn’t have
the plates. I didn’t even remember what the license number was.

The DMV woman in New York told me I could clear the whole thing up
for a $30 charge, which she could take care of with a credit card over
the phone.

Note that she had absolutely no way of identifying me, to know that
I wasn’t a terrorist just paying her $30 so I could get a dreaded
Pennsylvania drivers license to use as an ID for whatever nefarious
purposes I might have in mind. She just took down the credit card
number and bingo, I’m cleared to go. The New York DMV, happy with its
little act of extortion, is now notifying the National Driver Register
computer that I’m clear, and next week, Pennsylvania’s DMV will find my
record on the National Driver Register clean and will be ready to renew
my license.

This is the DMV and Homeland Security automotive equivalent of the
TSA rules that have now every flier taking off her or his shoes (even
baby’s’ booties!), and surrendering tubes of toothpaste and mouthwash
at airport security checkpoints.

A fundamental rule about rules should be that if there are records
being kept, and if actions are being taken on the basis of those
records, then there has to be a way for errors to be corrected by the
agency that is maintaining and disseminating those records and
by any agency that is acting on the basis of those records. But in the
case of America’s terrorism fetish, this rule is being violated
routinely.

The “no-fly” and the “let-fly-but-first-harass” lists maintained by
the TSA, which both reportedly now contain tens of thousands of names,
are used by the TSA at airport checkpoints, but developed not by the
TSA, but by the dozens of police and intelligence agencies of the
federal government—the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the ATF, the State
Department, the FBI, etc., etc. If your name turns up on the TSA list,
and you end up getting strip searched every time you try to fly, the
TSA will tell you you’re on the list, but they won’t tell you who put
you there, and they won’t take you off either. That has to be done by
the agency that reported your name—the one they won’t identify to you.
It’s straight out of Kafka.

The National Driver Register is the same kind of thing. It collects
information about license “problems” from all of the state DMVs, and
disseminates that information widely to all the other states, but it
doesn’t provide any details about what your “problem” might be. It
could be anything from conviction of vehicular homicide or DWI to a
15-year old case of being late with a car insurance payment. In fact,
DMV officials in both PA and NY, before they had the details,
repeatedly referred to my case as a “crime” when no crime had ever been
committed. And although, once I had discovered the nature of my
particular “transgression,” even though the Pennsylvania DMV people
agreed that it was a silly reason to withhold my licence renewal, and
that in fact I had done nothing wrong and was already fully switched
over to a Pennsylvania licence and car registration by the time the New
York license was “withheld,” they said they were “powerless” to renew
my license because of the federal law.

Kafka again.

We are at the mercy of lunatics
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Extra! Dog Bites Man! Read All About It!

dlindorff — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:23:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In the category of yawn-inducing stories that we knew all about
before they happened, comes word that the jury of senior uniformed
officers sitting in judgement of Osama Bin Laden’s chauffeur in the
first Bush-league military tribunal to actually go to a hearing at
Guantanamo Naval Station found the prisoner, Salim Hamdan…

Drum roll please…

Guilty of supporting terrorism.

I pause here for gasps of astonishment.

It’s awfully silent…

Really, did anyone expect anything else? The officers, who all have
careers to think about that would surely be severely crimped if they
went off script and found the man innocent of the charges, heard
evidence that was obtained through torture. They heard reports of
confessions from a man who himself was subjected to torture, by the
admission of the military itself, and who was never afforded an
attorney during those interrogations.

Okay. So now we need to ask, do we all feel safer, knowing that a
car driver whose claim to fame is that he used to drive the Evil One
from house to house and wife to wife is going to be locked up for life?

Wait a minute. He is already being locked up for life. At least, he
was captured in November 2001, and shipped to Guantanamo in May 2002,
and he’s been held there ever since—for over six years—awaiting this
trial, er, I mean tribunal. There certainly was no prospect of his ever
being let go before the tribunal, so I’m not sure what the point of
this exercise was really.

So now we can move on to the next tribunal—this one involving Ahmed
Khadr, a Canadian boy picked up in Afghanistan at the age of 15, who’s
been held now for six years on the base. His “crime” is that he was
bombed by the US Air Force, and then shot up (in the back) by US
Special Forces, but he somehow managed, at least allegedly, to toss a
grenade at his attackers, killing one (actually there is some testimony
that he didn’t actually toss the grenade, but then, why quibble about
details, right?).

Does anyone want to guess about the outcome of his “trial”?

Back in journalism school, I remember being told that the classic
definition of a news story was “Man Bites Dog!” The notion was that if
something totally predictable happens, like a dog biting a man, it
ain’t really news. Only if it is unexpected does it have any real news
value. By that standard, Hamdan’s conviction should be relegated to a
one-sentence notice in the news briefs section, but I’m guessing it’ll
be page one tomorrow all over America: Terrorist Convicted!

What we really need to be asking is why taxpayer dollars are being
spent on this shameful farce, which makes a joke of American “justice”
around the world.

Salim Hamdan is one of three things:

* a vile terrorist, in which case he should be tried in a regular
court of law by a jury of citizens, with all the rights available under
our Constitution

* a prisoner of war, in which case he should be sent back to
Afghanistan, since that war is now technically over (he is not a member
of the Taliban).

* an innocent schmuck who was working for a living driving a rich
bearded guy around the Hindu Kush, and who got picked up instead of his
boss, who’s still plotting ways to blow us all up while the US
government wastes its time and its personnel prosecuting his driver.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Then again, maybe it is news after all: “US Attacked By Terrorist Gang, Mastermind’s Driver Gets Life Seven Years Later”
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and columnist based in
Philadelphia. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St.
Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work
can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

America has a Double Standard When It Comes to Kids. Victims if Prostitutes, Terrorists if They Are Caught Fighting the US

dlindorff — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:44:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Double standards when it comes to children are pretty
appalling—especially when it comes to “our” kids vs. “their” kids, but
here in America they aren’t limited to just right-wingers.

Take reaction to the US Supreme Court’s latest ruling that you
cannot execute rapists—even those who rape children—on the theory that
only killing someone justifies execution.

Politicians who make their careers by promoting state sponsored
murder have been quick to condemn this latest “liberal outrage” by
calling for more laws that would make execution the punishment for
raping a child (admittedly a monstrous crime).

"Anybody in the country who cares about children should be outraged
that we have a Supreme Court that would issue a decision like this,"
says Republican Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who said the
court’s 5-4 decision makes America “a less safe place to grow up.”

Even Barack Obama has weighed in, along with John McCain, in
condemning the court’s decision, saying that states should be free to
pass death statutes for child rape.

Texas Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, supporting death for
“repeat child molesters, says, “Our top priority remains protecting our
most precious resource — our children." (Huh? I thought in Texas it was
oil.)

Then there’s the FBI’s latest sweeping busts of child prostitution
rings, which rescued 21 juveniles from sex-selling rings. In announcing
the arrests of some 300 people, FBI Director Robert Mueller said, "Our
top priority in these cases has always been to identify children
victims and move swiftly to remove them from these dangerous
environments.”

"These kids are victims,” said Ernie Allen, president of the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “They lack the
ability to walk away. This is the 21st-century slavery."

The question is, where are Mueller and Allen and these allegedly
concerned politicians when it comes to children who are forced or lured
into fighting against the US, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq? Where are
they when those children are captured by US military forces and
incarcerated with adult captives in hell-holes like Bagram Airbase in
Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or Guantanamo, where there was
a special children’s section called Camp Iguana? I certainly haven’t
heard a word from either Obama or that famous POW McCain in defense of
America’s child war prisoners.

Take Omar Khadr, shot and then captured and tortured by US forces
at the tender age of 15 in 2002 in Afghanistan and held for six years
in Guantanamo. Last week, I reported on his story
and on plans to try him by military tribunal as a terrorist because he
had dared, allegedly, to toss a grenade at US Special Forces troops who
had called in an air strike on him and several adult fighters, killing
one US soldier (at least one witness to the incident, a US soldier,
says it was not Khadr who three the grenade). Nobody’s saying that
Khadr was a victim. Nobody’s saying that he “lacked the ability to walk
away” from the Taliban forces that his father and older brothers had
him join at the age of 14 a year before. Nobody’s saying he should be
“identified” and “removed from these dangerous environments.”

Nobody in government or in child protection organizations is even
investigating to see if Khadr, as a 15-year-old captive, was tortured!
Indeed, the US has been blocking both Khadr’s military defense attorney
and his Canadian lawyer (Khadr is a Canadian citizen) from getting
military records giving the details of his capture and subsequent
treatment.

Canadian journalist Chris Cook reports that the Canadian government
actually argued in Canadian court against releasing the US reports in
its possession claiming doing so might “upset relations” between Canadian and
the United States. (The Canadian Supreme Court in May rejected that
pathetically subservient claim by a 9-0 vote, ordering full disclosure.)

The thing is, Khadr is just one of at least 2500 children who have
been captured and held as “enemy combatants” by the US in the
Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

Like child prostitutes, these captives, if they were even actually
involved in operations against the US (who would know, since they’ve
never been given hearings in court, and since in many cases the
evidence, such as it is, against them is the result of torture, either
of the children themselves, or of others), are at worst child soldiers,
who cannot be held responsible for their actions. Indeed, under the UN
Charter and the Geneva Convention, as amended by a protocol signed by
the US in 2002, any of them who, at the time of their capture, were
under 18, as was Khadr, are to be considered not POWs or “enemy
combatants,” but rather victims, who need care and treatment.

Aside from Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has filed an article of
impeachment against President Bush, charging him with a war crime for
holding these children, and for authorizing rules of engagement that
have encouraged the killing of children as young as 14, who are
“presumed” to be combatants, and for the six other members of the
House who have co-signed his impeachment bill (Rep. Robert Wexler,
D-FL, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-CA, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-CA, Rep. Tammy
Baldwin, D-WI, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-NY, and Rep. Sam Farr, D-CA), no
members of Congress have called for the protection of children captured
or held by US military forces.

Their, and the American public’s “concern” for the welfare of
children is narrowly limited to those who are lured or forced into
prostitution. That’s it.

Of course, we should not be surprised at this double standard. Most
of these same politicians are also quick to support laws that take
young children from poor (and usually minority) urban backgrounds who
commit violent crimes and have them tried, and punished, as adults.
Again, these children are as much victims as the kids who become child
prostitutes, but there’s no love lost on them by these “child welfare”
charlatans.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Heather Ryan Stands With Us on FISA Compromise

RDillon — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:35:54 -0400

It seems we are always complaining. No matter how hard we work, and how many we get elected, it seems that our ideals are always the ones that are being compromised. One need only look at the FISA compromise to feel that grassroots Democrats are just running around in circles. We need Democrats in Congress who will fight for us, even if it means breaking with conventional wisdom, and party leadership.

Enter Heather Ryan, Democrat for Kentucky's First Congressional District. In response to inquiries from potential constitutents, including myself, Heather has spoken up on the FISA compromise. From her email to my question on this issue:

Later this week, the Senate will be considering passage of the compromise on the FISA Bill. Since many voters in the First Congressional District of Kentucky have contacted me wondering what my stance on this legislation is, I felt compelled to speak on this issue.

While I was in Washington on that terrible day of Sept. 11, 2001 when planes crashed into the World Trade Center and in Western Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon, I can understand the passion that has fueled this bill. Having said that, I must urge the Senate to reject this FISA compromise as proposed and passed by the House of Representatives with H.R. 6304.

There are several reasons why I feel this bill is unnecessary. First, I think that we have lost focus on the fact that a competent Administration could have actually gone a long way in preventing this tragedy. The Bush Administration was warned in advance of 9-11 and did nothing at the time to prevent it. I believe if the Bush Administration would have acted on the intelligence provided them, then the 9-11 tragedy could have been avoided through the laws that existed at the time.

I also believe this law is an extension of the Bush Administration's attempts to politicize the Justice Department. Prosecuting entities are provided by the Constitution with checks and balances on which to operate. They already have very broad powers and if they found a credible threat would have no problem getting a warrant in a timely fashion.

Finally, I believe that FISA and this compromise are an abomination to the Constitution because it seeks to circumvent the checks and balances provided all of us by that sacred document. I strongly oppose giving the Telecom Corporations immunity when they knew they were breaking the law, when the Bush Administration asked them to break the law.

I saw where my opponent in this race, "Exxon Ed" Whitfield voted for this Legislation. I think it is pretty ironic when the very Republicans who lecture us regarding limiting the roll of the Federal Government propose, and push through, the House of Representatives a bill that vastly broadens the powers of the Federal Government. This is one issue on which Progressives, Moderates and Conservatives should all be able to agree. There are certain things on which none of us should ever compromise, and the Constitution is one thing on which I will never compromise as Representative of Kentucky's First District.

Heather Ryan
Democratic Candidate
KY-01

I personally could not agree with Heather more. Reading these words made me proud to support Heather, a Democrat with courage that will represent us if elected.

We need new, and better Democrats. Democrats who will fight for us, and who believe what we believe. On both counts, we need Heather Ryan in the Congress. Support our values here:

http://www.actblue.com/page/americansforryan

Best wishes Democrats!!

Move on to impeachment

richardmathews — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:49:16 -0400

MoveOn is finally moving on to talk about the possibility of impeachment proceedings!

Sign their petition:
http://pol.moveon.org/subpoena/

It states:

"Congress must force Vice President Cheney to respond to its subpoenas. If he continues to obstruct justice and disregard the rule of law, Congress has no choice but to begin impeachment proceedings against him."

Richard M. Mathews