Newshoggers.com

When They Stand Up...They'll Shoot At Us

By Steve Hynd

Brandon Friedman notes a New York Times article:

NAWA, Afghanistan -- One week after several battalions of Marines swept through the Helmand River valley, military commanders appear increasingly concerned about a lack of Afghan forces in the field.

"What I need is more Afghans," said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. He accompanied the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, during a visit with troops at Patrol Base Jaker here on Monday.

And adds:

As I said over at the SWJ site, this would be stunning, frankly, if the Afghan forces don't materialize. After all this talk of doing things differently after eight years, after all the talk of "putting an Afghan face" on it, after all the hoopla surrounding McChrystal's appointment and the "new" COIN strategy, we send 4,000 troops into a Taliban-held area without a full complement of Afghan forces?

The trouble is, even when Afghan security forces are present they often create more problems than they solve. I mentioned the other day that Afghan villagers in Helmland fear their police more than the Taliban. Now U.S. Marines are having problems too.

As about 150 Marines and Afghan soldiers approached the police headquarters in the Helmand River town of Aynak, the police fired four gunshots at the combined force. No larger fight broke out, but once inside the headquarters the Marines found a raggedy force in a decrepit mud-brick compound that the police used as an open-pit toilet.

The meeting was tense. Some police were smoking pot. Others loaded their guns in a threatening manner near the Marines.

That's after eight years of "when they stand up, we can stand down". Policemen are now getting eight weeks of training meant to cure them of their behaviour, but when they're only earning $150 a month.  (Nor can the Afghans even afford that measly stipend on their own.) Thus police officers are suplementing their incomes with bribes, drug smuggling and petty larceny...and well, brigands will be brigands.Do we really want to stay another decade just to turn them into well trained brigands?

The Independent's cartoon today is as good a stratergy as the current one:

Screw the hicks

By Fester:

Screw the hicks!

At least that sounds like one plausible interpretation of the trial balloon of the US government actually attempting to follow through on the rule of law. That intrepretation treats Yoo's memos as established and reasonable law, and only goes after the interrogators who thought that testicle crushing was for the weak and wimpy.

If this is the case, it is Abu Ghraib all over again. There, the only people who were punished and castigated were the people who were dumb enough to follow orders on everything except the NO PICTURES part of the implied order. The 'leadership' elements were not prosecuted, the architects of transferring a torture and false confession system into an 'intelligence' system were not punished, and the political leadership which condoned and encouraged this lawlessness was re-elected. There was no accountability mechanism except for the hicks who got caught with indefensible pictures.

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings defends the underlings with an informational asymetry defense:

An underling in the field is not a lawyer. He has a responsibility to refuse orders that he knows to be illegal, but he is not a lawyer. When something is unambiguously criminal, like beating a prisoner to death, there is no wiggle room. But I admit that some things will in fact be in gray areas. Not being a lawyer, the person in the field can only go by his training and by the information provided by legal experts when he encounters a gray area. If a person in the field encounters something that appears to be a gray area, I might excuse him if he goes by the guidance of lawyers and manuals, and follows orders that are consistent with what the training materials and legal experts tell him is legal.

But in allowing latitude for the person who goes by his training in a gray area, we have to recognize that this imposes an even greater responsibility on people who write manuals, or legal experts who write memos. If we ever contemplate leniency for an underling who does something because a legal memo advises him that it is not a crime, then we have to impose a very high standard on the people who render that advice.

Let’s sweep up and down the entire chain, and if there should be leniancy (in exchange for testimony), it should be for the men and women at the bottom of the chain of command, and not at the top.

Murdoch paper hacked "two to three thousand" public figures' phones

By Steve Hynd

If Murdoch's gang will stoop to this in the UK, they'll stoop as low in the U.S.

Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

...The suppressed legal cases are linked to the jailing in January 2007 of News of the World reporter Clive Goodman for hacking into the mobile phones of three royal staff, an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. At the time, News International said it knew of no other journalist who was involved in hacking phones and that Goodman had been acting without their knowledge.

However, one senior source at the Metropolitan police told the Guardian that during the Goodman inquiry, officers had found evidence of News Group staff using private investigators who hacked into "thousands" of mobile phones. Another source with direct knowledge of the police findings put the figure at "two or three thousand" mobiles. They suggest that MPs from all three parties and cabinet ministers, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell, were among the targets. News International has always maintained that it has no knowledge of phone hacking by anybody acting on its behalf.

And the kicker? The editor of the newspaper in question went on to become the current communication officer for the Conservative party. Former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, one of those who allegedly had his phone hacked, told Channel Four News:

I find it staggering that there could be a list known to the police of people known to have their phone tapped, I am named as one of them, for such a criminal act not to be reported to me and not for action to be taken against he people who've done it reflects very badly upon the police and I want to know their answer.

"I'm not surprised that News International are into this. I think Andy Coulson was editor at the time in the News of the World and moved on from the job while the reporter went to jail. And in that case they admitted to tapping phones. "

"I find it absolutely staggering that Andy Coulson can go to be the communication officer for the Tory party …  surely Andy Colson can not be the man who's been supervising over all this activity as the editor in charge of the paper and still stay in that job. "

I wonder if something like this is how Rove managed to wield so much power.

UPDATE: CJR's Ryan Chittum has an interesting connection for you.

Now, we normally wouldn’t write about a tabloid scandal in Britain. But the executive who oversaw News’ UK papers at the time is Les Hinton, who is now CEO of Dow Jones & Company, parent of The Wall Street Journal. The Guardian writes that he has “misled” Parliament and the public, “albeit in good faith.” Basically, the exec ultimately responsible for News of the World at the time of the scandal is now the guy in charge of The Wall Street Journal.

Detainee Policy Gives Obama Credibility Deficit

By Steve Hynd

I don't know about the rest of you, but I strongly feel if Obama is willing to break the universal rule of law as understood by democratic nations to the extent of keeping people in jail after they've been aquitted, after all he said during his campaign and in his first few weeks in office, then there is nothing upon which his word is trustworthy.

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." 

...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.

You have to assume that anything reasonable coming out of this administration is "pure window dressing", "procedures to prettify the process", which will simply be a cover for maintaining the status quo and increasing the power of the presidency. That applies to healthcare, the economy, the Af/Pak region, energy, global climate change, you name it. You have to, for your own safety, simply because Obama's detainee policy is such a massively criminal break with what Western democracies regard as legal and moral that literally any other crime is possible. That, for many, was exactly the problem with Bush and his administration. Given what they had done on Iraq and Gitmo, it was impossible to trust them to stay within legal boundaries on other matters. And they often didn't.

Murtha to hire Dewey Cheatum & Howe

By Fester:

Rep. Murtha will be hiring the prestigious law firm of Dewey Cheatum & Howe as some of his associates are being very friendly with the Feds investigating an alleged kickback scheme for earnmarks.  Via the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Federal prosecutors filed corruption charges yesterday against a onetime defense contractor who has ties to both U.S. Rep. John Murtha and a suburban Johnstown defense contractor currently under criminal investigation.

Richard S. Ianieri, former president and CEO of Coherent Systems International Corp., was accused of accepting $200,000 in kickbacks. He is charged through a criminal information and is expected to plead guilty.

If I understand the legal system well enough, a criminal information is usually what is used for an indictment where there is a pre-arranged plea deal.  Commonly that plea dealer will involve the defendent to start talking and filling in the gaps.  If I was Rep. Murtha, I would be sweating, especially after I have gone on the record with a defense of corruption that is amazingly old-school hack:

The Murtha quote in the Post Gazette is priceless (actually, we can probably get a price for it if we hire PMA...)

"If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district," Mr. Murtha said. "My job as a member of Congress is to make sure that we take care of what we see is necessary. Not the bureaucrats who are unelected over there in whatever White House, whether it's Republican or Democrat. Those bureaucrats would like to control everything. Every president would like to have all the power and not have Congress change anything. But we're closest to the people."

Change names and that statement could come from Rep. Young, (R-AK), or Tom Delay or half a dozen current federal prisoners.

The fine firm of Dewey Cheatum & Howe will make a bloody fortune off of the Murtha defense if things proceed the way I think they will....

Obama, Like Bush, Wrong On Indefinite Detention

By Steve Hynd

A Pro-Publica report for the Washington Post which says that the Obama administration is drafting an executive order to reassert Bush's claimed presidential authority to lock up detainees forever without trial.

It's generating a lot of blogger comment, with rightwing posts being mostly along the lines of "see, we told you Bush was right" and leftwing posts being critical of Obama's plans and the very notion of indefinite detention.

The report is being described as a "trial balloon". Not to see if people will accept the idea of indefinite detentions - Obama has already said explicitly those will happen - but to see if doing an end-run around Congress to proclaim the right to do so by executive fiat will upset too many very important people.

I've nothing really to add to Glenn Greenwald's post on this report, and in particular this:

A government that will give you a trial before imprisoning you only where it knows ahead of time it will win -- and, where it doesn't know that, will just imprison you without a trial -- isn't a government that believes in due process.  It's one that believes in show trials.

This move is an abuse of authority and immoral at every level.

Obama has already foreited my (always sceptical) support - over his claims to secrecy, his abysmal Af/Pak non-plan, his denials of habeas rights and his continued torturing of the facts about Iran's nuclear program. My original fears have been proven justified, he's America's Tony Blair. Yes, he's better than John McCain or Hillary Clinton would have been in the Oval Office; that's a pretty low bar though, and not one that should garner progressives' uncritical support for a president who simply isn't very good at all.

Supremes skeptical of the state

By Fester:

If you told me that there would be two Supreme Court cases released this week that pitted an expanded trust of government officials' say so against marginalized individuals, I would bet that both cases would be for expanded governmental authority and reduced rights and autonomy for marginalized classes of individuals. 

I am glad that I am wrong.  The Supremes in the Redding case (the 13 year old strip searched at school for suspected possesion of NSAIDs) and Menendez-Diaz case ruled for the marginalized individual against the power and authority of the state and its agents to act without check.  The Menendez-Diaz ruling requires crime lab analysts to actually defend their findings at a trial if the defense wants to question them.  The assumption is that scientific evidence is not perfect, which is a reasonably description asRadley Balko has shown numerous times in just the field of bite mark analysis. 

I'm surprised, but glad that there is a coalition on the courts who have some question of the decision to place the benefit of the doubt on marginal cases towards the player with far more power, the government, instead of on the party with minimal power.  If there is a good case with solid evidence, these decisions will not impact the course of justice.  However these decisions will provide a higher probability of justice being served when the case is weak. 

Tolerance in Zero-Tolerance

By Fester:

It is sad that we need a Supreme Court ruling saying that humiliation and strip-searches on a middle-schooler on the concerns that she may or may not have Advil or Aleve on her person is an unreasonable intrusion of privacy.  It is worse that this was not a unanimous decision. 

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a good take on the nature of the zero-tolerance fetish that has been expanding throughout our public sphere for my entire life.  It is impossible to actually have zero tolerance on all potentially deviant behaviors, the enforcement and monitoring costs are too high:

it’s important to understand that in zero tolerance land, it becomes acceptable to freak out over things like a girl having Midol in her purse or some boy wears baggy pants.  When anything can be treated like rock solid evidence of criminality, it becomes super easy to railroad kids that trip up the school officials’ prejudices.  Not that I don’t think the school-to-prison pipeline couldn’t exist without zero tolerance, but I’m guessing it greases the wheels significantly.  The irony of zero tolerance is that it’s going to be selectively enforced.  It has to be.  When you can blow pretty much any behavior up to make it seem criminal, either everyone is turned into a criminal or you simply focus all your attention on kids that you had your suspicions about

A good friend of mine is currently going through a federal background and security check for a federal police/law enforcement position.  I have known "Bob" for close to two decades now.  We were thick as thieves.  There were five of us in high school who had each others' back and stuck together no matter what.  As far as I know there is nothing for Bob to be concerned about for the feds to uncover.  He never smoked weed (none of us did in high school) and harder drugs were something that he stayed away from as well.

There was nothing that Bob ever actually got tagged for on his official record besides a few speeding tickets as we ran up to either Hampton Beach in the summer or Gunstock in the winter.  There may have been one failure to come to a complete stop citation but I was quietly drunk and he was flirting with the cop, so that may have been a warning instead of a ticket. 

He never got tagged for anything.  This is despite the fact that the five of us as a group drank more beer than most high schoolers, drove just as poorly as most high schoolers, got into short, decisive and violent fights in front of non-involved witnesses, sent a couple of people to the hospital, wrecked a bar  and engaged in numerous other little slivers of law breaking.  After we wrecked that bar, the owner smiled and said he did not want to see us for the next couple of weeks as he knew we did not start the trouble.

None of us got tagged for anything despite the fact that our behavioral patterns should have made us high risk individuals.  And it was not because the cops never noticed what we were doing.  We were hassled often enough (usually with decent cause) but we were not assholes back to the cops, were white, dressed as middle class kids and otherwise we did not ping the "this is worth the trouble" radar for the cops in question.  We knew where the limit of 'reasonable lawbreaking' was and could rely upon the fact that the cops in the area that we grew up in were unconsciously or consciously subservient to the existing political power structure. 

Zero tolerance laws and regulations for some of our behaviors were in full force if you listened to the blowhard city counselors or the town meeting, but the cops would have been overwhelmed on running every kid that we knew into the station for curfew, noise or alcohol violations that they selectively enforced the law.  And the selective enforcement of the law always seemed to land on the people without the political capacity to cause trouble.  Amazing how that turns out.

So my buddy Bob has nothing on his record and a chance at a pretty damn good job that a couple of acquaintances of mine will never have because our behaviors were tolerated in a zero tolerance environment while their same behaviors were not. 

Bagram, the new Guantánamo

By Steve Hynd

Clive Stafford Smith at the Guardian responds to the BBC report of abuse and torture at Bagram prison in Afghanistan that I mentioned earlier.

President Obama told us that this sort of thing has stopped. Well, it hasn't.

Sadly, the Obama administration is up to the former administration's familiar tricks, attempting to block the world from the truth. In April, a federal judge in Washington DC ordered that prisoners in Bagram should be allowed counsel, and the right to be heard in court; the Obama administration refused to comply, and appealed the judgment. People being beaten up in Bagram should, apparently, grin and bear it.

The US is spending $50m on a new prison for Bagram, housing more than 1,000 people – to add to the 600 who are already there. Of these, many (including all those in the recent Washington case) were not originally captured in Afghanistan at all, but in other countries. The US then rendered them into Afghanistan.

The British government should have a sense of familiarity with this story: in February, Defence Minister John Hutton admitted that British personnel had taken two Pakistani men prisoner in Iraq in 2004, and had subsequently handed them to the Americans. The men were rendered to Afghanistan, where they have now been held – and, if the latest BBC report is anything to go by, presumably beaten – for five years. They have never been charged. The US argues that it is too dangerous to allow them lawyers – and yet, like so many others, the first time they went to Afghanistan was when the US took them there.

...Bagram is the evil twin of Guantánamo Bay, if rather more cut off from the world, and all things we consider civilised.

And, make no mistake, the Obama administration bears ultimate responsibility for what is happening there now. Back in March, Amnesty International issued a plea to Obama:

Amnesty International has urged the new administration not to repeat its predecessor's use of secrecy to conceal from the public its response to the judge. Transparency, essential to accountability and detainee protection, must be central to US detention policy. As President Obama has himself instructed his administration, "transparency promotes accountability".

The need for transparency was illustrated late last month when the UK government revealed that two individuals it handed over to the USA in Iraq in 2004 had subsequently been transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, where they remain five years later.

Amnesty International has asked the US government to confirm whether the two are held in Bagram and to provide further information on their cases. The organization has raised the possibility that the USA's transfer of these individuals to Afghanistan constituted a war crime.

Amnesty International continues to call for the Bagram detainees to be granted access to an independent court to challenge the lawfulness of their detentions, to effective remedies in relation to their treatment and conditions of detention, and to meaningful access to legal counsel for such purposes. At present, the detainees have no access to lawyers or courts.

Obama has shown no sign of listening: even as he continues to hold his administrations actions on Gitmo up as a premier policy change, his administation continues following the same criminal course in another, more secret, location. 

Ex Gitmo Prosecutor: "Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it"

By Steve Hynd

Yet another voice raised for prosecution of Bush era war crimes - former Gitmo prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who joined ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero in an op-ed for Salon (h/t Turkana):

Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it. Those are two indisputable facts. Given the mountains of evidence already in the public domain, any effort to deny or soften that harsh and devastating reality is either disingenuous, uninformed or a result of the human instinct to avoid painful truths.

...To date, the evidence that U.S. officials engaged in widespread and systemic torture and abuse of detainees with the authorization of the highest Bush administration officials comes from a wide range of sources. There are congressional reports, journalistic investigations, detainees’ own accounts, and even -- astonishingly -- boastful admissions by some of the highest officials of the Bush administration, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been aggressively forthright in his defense of torture methods including waterboarding.

...But notwithstanding all this evidence that domestic and international laws were violated, there are still those who would reduce these crimes to discretionary policy decisions subject to legitimate debate. There is even a robust public discussion about whether "torture works" -- a jaw-dropping debate to be having in the United States of America -- as if that could be reliably determined, and as if that would make it OK.

This cannot be the way forward in a country committed to the rule of law that applies to everyone, regardless of status or position. We have a Department of Justice for a reason, and now it’s up to Attorney General Holder, the nation’s top law enforcement officer, to do his job and appoint an independent prosecutor to follow the evidence where it may lead. In this country, we investigate crimes and, when appropriate, we prosecute them. Once we start compromising our principles and laws because it is too messy, too inconvenient or even too painful to enforce them, we render them meaningless. This is not a political issue, but a moral and legal one.

It's a sucinct wrap up of the argument for a special prosecutor and, I think, an entirely compelling one unless you are willing to subjugate morality to political gamesmanship.