War Room – Salon.com:

The president’s power to imprison people forever

The administration is obviously aware of the transparent, and really quite pitiful, election-based fear that is consuming Democrats and rendering them unwilling to impede (or even object to) the administration’s seizure of more and more unchecked power in the name of fighting terrorism. As a result of this abdication by the Democrats, the Washington Post reports, the administration spent the weekend expanding even further the already-extraordinary torture and detention powers vested in it by the McCain-Warner-Graham “compromise.” To illustrate just how profoundly dangerous these powers are, it is worthwhile to review a specific, current case of an actual detainee in the administration’s custody.

Bilal Hussein is an Associated Press photographer and Iraqi citizen who has been imprisoned by the U.S. military in Iraq for more than five months, with no charges of any kind. Prior to that, he was repeatedly accused by right-wing blogs of being in cahoots with Iraqi insurgents based on the content of his photojournalism — accusations often based on allegations that proved to be completely fabricated and fictitious. The U.S. military now claims that Hussein has been lending “support” to the Iraqi insurgents, whereas Hussein maintains that his only association with them is to report on their activities as a journalist. But Hussein has no ability to contest the accusations against him or prove his innocence because the military is simply detaining him indefinitely and refusing even to charge him.

Under the military commission legislation blessed by our Guardians of Liberty in the Senate — such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham — the U.S. military could move Hussein to Guantánamo tomorrow and keep him there for the rest of his life, and he would have absolutely no recourse of any kind. It does not need to bring him before a military commission (the military only has to do that if it wants to execute someone) and as long as it doesn’t, he is blocked from seeking an order from a U.S. federal court to release him on the ground that he is completely innocent. As part of his permanent imprisonment, the military could even subject him to torture and he would have no legal recourse whatsoever to contest his detention or his treatment. As Johns Hopkins professor Hilary Bok points out, even the use of the most extreme torture techniques that are criminalized will be immune from any real challenge, since only the government (rather than detainees) will be able to enforce such prohibitions.

Put another way, this bill would give the Bush administration the power to imprison people for their entire lives, literally, without so much as charging them with any wrongdoing or giving them any forum in which to contest the accusations against them. It thus vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists — namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations. Just to look at one ramification, does one even need to debate whether this newly vested power of indefinite imprisonment would affect the willingness of foreign journalists to report on the activities of the Bush administration? Do Americans really want our government to have this power?

The changes that the administration reportedly secured over the weekend for this “compromise” legislation make an already dangerous bill much worse. Specifically, the changes expand the definition of who can be declared an “enemy combatant” (and therefore permanently detained and tortured) from someone who has “engaged in hostilities against the United States” (meaning actually participated in war on a battlefield) to someone who has merely “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.”

Expanding the definition in that way would authorize, as Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies points out, the administration’s “seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield.” The administration would be able to abduct anyone, anywhere in the world, whom George W. Bush secretly decrees has “supported” hostilities against the United States. And then they could imprison any such persons at Guantánamo — even torture them — forever, without ever having to prove anything to any tribunal or commission. (The Post story also asserts that the newly worded legislation “does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant,” although the Supreme Court ruled [in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld] that there are constitutional limits on the government’s ability to detain U.S. citizens without due process.)

The tyrannical nature of these powers is not merely theoretical. The Bush administration has already imprisoned two American citizens — Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi — and held them in solitary confinement in a military prison while claiming the power to do so indefinitely and without ever having to bring charges. And now, it is about to obtain (with the acquiescence, if not outright support, of Senate Democrats) the express statutory power to detain people permanently (while subjecting them, for good measure, to torture) without providing any venue to contest the validity of their detention. And as Democrats sit meekly by, the detention authority the administration is about to obtain continues — literally each day — to expand, and now includes some of the most dangerous and unchecked powers a government can have.

— Glenn Greenwald

Waxman on warpath over Blackwater payments:

Joseph Neff and Jay Price, Staff Writers

The Democrat slated to be the U.S. House’s lead watchdog next year demanded answers Thursday about why Blackwater USA was paid so much for security work in Iraq — and why, in fact, the North Carolina company was paid at all.

Taxpayers paid exorbitant prices for Blackwater’s services, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman wrote in a letter to outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Waxman said it wasn’t clear precisely how much taxpayers overpaid because the Army hasn’t provided answers to questions first raised two years ago,

The California congressman said that Blackwater’s services were not just pricey, but prohibited, because the Army never authorized Blackwater or any other Halliburton subcontractors to guard convoys or carry weapons. Houston-based Halliburton has been paid at least $16 billion to provide food, lodging and other support for troops in Iraq, and $2.4 billion to work on Iraqi oil infrastructure.

Waxman demanded “whether and how the Army intends to recover taxpayer funds paid to Halliburton and Blackwater for services prohibited under [Halliburton’s] contract.”

The high cost of private military contractors and the use of multiple layers of subcontractors surfaced after four Blackwater men were massacred in Fallujah in March 2004. Wesley Batalona, Scott Helvenston, Michael Teague and Jerry Zovko were guarding a convoy for ESS, a food supplier to the military, when they were ambushed. A mob dragged their charred corpses through the streets and hung the remains of two from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The grotesque images were broadcast around the world and triggered a deadlier phase of the war.

Waxman, the next chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, has tried to get answers about the Blackwater and Halliburton contracts for two years, since The News & Observer detailed how multiple layers of contracts inflated war costs.

At the lowest level, Blackwater security guards were paid $600 a day. Blackwater added a 36 percent markup, plus overhead costs, and sent the bill to a Kuwaiti company that ordinarily runs hotels, according to the contract.

Tacked on costs, profit

That company, Regency Hotel, tacked on costs and profit and sent an invoice to ESS. The food company added its costs and profit and sent its bill to Kellogg Brown & Root, a division of Halliburton, which added overhead and profit and presented the final bill to the Pentagon.

In his letter Thursday, Waxman said he had not received accurate answers from the Army and Blackwater when their officials testified under oath before his committee.

Tina Ballard, an undersecretary of the Army, testified in September that the Army had never authorized Halliburton or its subcontractors to carry weapons or guard convoys. Ballard testified that Blackwater provided no services for Halliburton or its subcontractors.

Waxman said ESS had sent him a memo saying the food company had hired Blackwater to provide security services under the Halliburton contract.

“If the ESS memo is accurate, it appears that Halliburton entered into a subcontracting arrangement that is expressly prohibited by the contract itself,” Waxman wrote. “After more than two years, we still do not know how much ESS and Halliburton charged for these security services.”

At a hearing in June, Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor testified that Blackwater’s 36 percent markup included all the company’s costs. Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, interrupted, reminded Taylor he was under oath and ordered Blackwater to provide the documents to back up his testimony. Blackwater has not provided any of the contracts and other documents requested by the committee.

In Thursday’s letter, Waxman said Taylor’s testimony was wrong: Blackwater’s contracts posted on The N&O’s Web site showed that Blackwater billed separately for insurance, room and board, travel, weapons, ammunition, vehicles and office space, as The N&O article reported.

A spokeswoman for Ballard did not immediately return a call Thursday. Joseph C. Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel for Blackwater’s parent company, The Prince Group, said he would have to defer comment until he could obtain and read the documents referred to in Waxman’s letter.

Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, released a statement: “All information available to KBR confirms that Blackwater’s work for ESS was not in support of KBR and not under a KBR subcontract.”

TPMmuckraker December 18, 2006

* In March, the administration announced it would no longer produce
the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which
identifies which programs best assist low-income families, while also
tracking health insurance coverage and child support.

* In 2005, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration announced it would stop publishing its annual report on international terrorism.

* After the Bureau of Labor Statistics uncovered discouraging data

about factory closings in the U.S., the administration announced it
would stop publishing information about factory closings.

* When an annual report called “Budget Information for States”

showed the federal government shortchanging states in the midst of
fiscal crises, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget announced it was discontinuing the report, which some said was the only source for comprehensive data on state funding from the federal government.

* When Bush’s Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming, the administration said it would sharply cut back on the information it collects about charter schools.

* The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has to date failed to produce
a congressionally-mandated report on climate change that was due in
2004. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has called the failure an “obfuscation.”

* The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced

plans to close several libraries which were used by researchers and
scientists. The agency called its decision a cost-cutting measure, but
a 2004 report showed that the facilities actually brought the EPA a
$7.5 million surplus annually.

* On November 1st, 2001, President Bush issued an executive order

limiting the public’s access to presidential records. The order
undermined the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which required the
release of those records after 12 years. Bush’s order prevented the release
of “68,000 pages of confidential communications between President
Ronald Reagan and his advisers,” some of whom had positions in the Bush
Administration. More here. (Thanks to Roger A. and nitpicker below.) Update: TPMm Reader JP writes in to point out that Bush did the same thing with his papers from the Texas governorship.

* A rule change at the U.S. Geological Survey restricts agency scientists

from publishing or discussing research without that information first
being screened by higher-ups at the agency. Special screening will be
given to “findings or data that may be especially newsworthy, have an
impact on government policy, or contradict previous public
understanding to ensure that proper officials are notified and that
communication strategies are developed.” The scientists at the USGS
cover such controversial topics as global warming. Before, studies were
released after an anonymous peer review of the research. (Thanks to Alison below.)

* A new policy

at the The U.S. Forest Service means the agency no longer will generate
environmental impact statements for “its long-term plans for America’s
national forests and grasslands.” It also “no longer will allow the
public to appeal on long-term plans for those forests, but instead will
invite participation in planning from the outset.” (Thanks to libra below.)

* In March 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services took down

a six-year-old Web site devoted to substance abuse and treatment
information for gays and lesbians, after members of the conservative
Family Research Council complained.

* In 2002, HHS removed information from its Web site pertaining to risky sexual behavior among adolescents, condom use and HIV.

* Also in 2002, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission removed
from its Web site a document showing that officials found large gaps in
a portion of an aging Montana dam. A FERC official said the deletion
was for “national security.”

* In 2004, the FBI attempted

to retroactively classify public information regarding the case of
bureau whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, including a series of letters
between the Justice Department and several senators.

* In October 2003, the Bush administration banned photographs depicting servicemembers’ coffins returning from overseas.

* In December 2002, the administration curtailed funding
to the Mass-Layoffs Statistics program, which released monthly data on
the number and size of layoffs by U.S. companies. His father attempted
to kill the same program in 1992, but Clinton revived it when he
assumed the presidency.

* In 2004, the Internal Revenue Service stopped providing data demonstrating the level of its job performance. In 2006, a judge forced the IRS to provide the information.

* Also in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission blocked access
to a once-public database of network outages affecting
telecommunications service providers. The FCC removed public copies and
exempted the information from Freedom of Information Act requests,
saying it would “jeopardize national security efforts.” Experts
ridiculed that notion.

* In 2002, Bush officials intervened to derail

the publication of an EPA report on mercury and children’s health,
which contradicted the administration’s position on lowering
regulations on certain power plants. The report was eventually leaked
by a “frustrated EPA official.”

* In 2003, the EPA bowed to White House pressure and deleted

the global warming section in its annual “Rep
ort on the Environment.”
The move drew condemnations from Democrats and Republicans alike.

* Also in 2003, the EPA withheld

for months key findings from an air pollution report that undercut the
White House’s “Clear Skies” initiative. Leaked copies were reported in
the Washington Post.

World-O-Crap:

Elder care obligations have kept me on the run this week, but I see that Jonah Goldberg left his mark on the Los Angeles Times Opinion page yesterday. So did my parakeet, but Jonah clearly outperformed her by managing to cover twice as many column inches while still working with the same basic materials.

ONE THOUSAND three hundred and forty seven days.

Jonah’s head has now officially been up his ass longer than America was involved in World War II.

That’s how long the United States was involved in combat in World War II, and Monday, the U.S. passed that “grim military milestone,” as one TV anchor called it. This factoid has become a fixture of respectable talking points about the futility of the Iraq war. Newscasters and pundits note its gravity with sober foreboding and slight head-shaking.

The only thing they don’t note is the grotesque stupidity of the comparison.

And when Jonah wants to talks about “grotesque stupidity,” it’s like a bearded sea captain in a yellow sou’wester who wants to tell you about his 3 Way Chowder and Bisque Sampler. Trust the Gorton’s Fisherman.

Let us start with the obvious. World War II may have lasted 1,347 days, but it cost the lives of 406,000 Americans and wounded 600,000 more. Losses among Allied civilians and military personnel stretched into the tens of millions. Whole cities were razed, populations displaced, economies shattered.

All that and it still took less time than George Bush’s Outward Bound excursion to Baghdad.

The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq remains much less than 1% of our WWII losses.

Amazing! Unless you continue with the obvious, and observe that we have roughly 135,000 troops in Iraq, while there were over 16 million men and women in the Armed Forces during World War II.

World War II ended when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Were it not for those grave measures, the war might have lasted for another year or two and cost many more lives. So maybe those wielding the WWII yardstick as a cudgel would prefer we gave Sadr City and Tikrit the Hiroshima-Nagasaki treatment?

Well, Jonah promised grotesque stupidity, but I have to say, he delivered well beyond my wildest dreams. This is the H-Bomb of Strawman Arguments, and earns the coveted Order of the Wicker Man with Screaming Christopher Lee Cluster:

That would surely root out even the most die-hard insurgents and shorten the war.

Yeah, I can’t see any of the other Sunni and Shiite communities in the region getting all worked up just because we expunged a couple of Sunni and Shiite cities in Iraq with nuclear weapons. Tony Snow might have to take a little chin music at the next presser, but I predict it would be a 24 hour story, tops.

The phase of the Iraq war that was comparable to World War II ended in less than three weeks.

That would the phase where we weren’t sucking like Jeff Gannon on an overbooked holiday weekend.

Remember “shock and awe”?

Yeah. Principally, I remember that it sounded pretty stupid. But now – and I gotta admit, props to Jonah – it sounds grotesquely stupid.

As far as such things go, the conventional war put WWII to shame.

Yeah, all the Allies had to do in WWII was to fight a multi-front war spanning the globe from Scandinavia to the South Pacific. In Iraq, we had to fight our way from Kuwait City to Baghdad, a distance of 344 miles! (And it sounds even more impressive when you count it in kilometers!)

the U.S. military victory was akin to defeating all of Italy in less than a month.

Wellll…If you don’t count the fact that Italy was muddy, mountainous, and defended by both Fascist troops and a well-equipped, battle-hardened German Army that didn’t collapse at the first sound of gunfire, then yeah. Sure.

The current phase of the Iraq war — whether we call it post-occupation, reconstruction, civil war or whatever — is really a separate war.

Donald Rumsfeld’s greatest innovation: The Modular War. Today…Iraq. Tomorrow…Ikea!

It’s at once a Hobbesian nightmare in which chaos rules as well as a complex, multi-front battle between various regional factions and their proxies.

I can see why Jonah is so prone to defend it. Who wouldn’t want to hop on some of that sweet action?

But as insurgencies go, it hasn’t lasted very long at all or cost very many American lives.

At least, it hasn’t killed any of the people Jonah meets for crumble cake and vanilla mocha lattes at Starbucks.

The man who probably deserves the most credit for the low number of American deaths in Iraq is Donald H. Rumsfeld. The outgoing Defense secretary decided from the outset that U.S. forces would have a “light footprint” and would opt for surgical efficiency over the kitchen-sink approach that characterized World War II.

Jonah has a point. If there’s one gripe I have with our strategy in WWII, it’s that we simply had too many men. It wasn’t sporting, and it made us look like big insecure bullies. Imagine how much more respectfully the Nazis would have received us if, instead of rolling into Germany with 3 separate armies and millions of troops, we’d tried to occupy them with, say, 150,000? Now that would have been a fight! Face it, people like to get their money’s worth; nobody likes a knockout in the first round. And if we’d only followed the Rumsfeldian “light footprint” doctrine, why, we might still be fighting the Nazis today. Just imagine the pay-per-view possibilities!

Rumsfeld’s way is better, at least on paper. All else being equal, it’s better to have a long war with fewer casualties than a short war with more of them. That’s why the World War II comparison is so frivolous: Days don’t cost anything, lives do.

Except when we’re losing 2 or 3 or 4 lives per day, every day we stay in Iraq. But who cares? Sands through the hourglass, and all that.

Given the enormous scope of World War II, it was a remarkably short war. (Just think of the Hundred Years War by comparison.)

Given the enormous amount of traffic it carries, Fifth Avenue is a remarkably short street. (Just think of the Pan-American Highway. Or the distance from the Sun to Uranus.)

(Okay, I admit, now I’m just cherry-picking the juiciest fruits of stupidity.)

Indeed, when partisans claim that the American people are fed up and want our troops home, they’re deliberately muddying the waters.

Which Jonah objects to on principle, except when he’s using your Jacuzzi.

The American people have never objected to far-flung deployments of our troops. We’ve had soldiers stationed all over the world for decades.

Not getting shot at and blown up on a daily basis, but still…They’re definitely out of earshot.

What the American people don’t like is losing — lives or wars. After all, you don’t hear many people complaining that we still have troops in Japan and Germany more than 20,000 days later.

Even though you can’t get from Tempelhof to the Unter den Linden without your taxi getting hulled by a .50 sniper rifle or dismantled by an IED, people still support our occupation of Berlin. See? It’s all just a matter of perspective. Grotesquely. Stupid. Perspective.

Wingnuts | 10 Comments

The Volokh Conspiracy – Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?::

Anderson (mail) (www):
but do policy makers and administrators really need to know the origin of the split in Islam?

Love the spin here. That’s not what Stein asked. A functioning knowledge of how the Sunni/Shiite split works in today’s politics was enough to win the lollipop.

The FBI official didn’t even know that Iran and Hezbollah were Shiite.

For that matter, I’m nothing but a health-care attorney, with two kids, who glances over the paper and the blogs more days of the week than not … and somehow, over the past 5 years, I’ve managed to pick up a rough notion of the origins of the Sunni/Shiite split, let alone the lineup in today’s Middle East. And it ain’t even my job to know it.

At some point, defending the pathetic becomes pathetic itself.

FUBAR – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

BEIFT – Behold, Every Indicator Forebodes Trouble; pronounced “beefed”

TULLYCAST IT!

• X
• Facebook
• Tumblr
• Reddit
• Print

Like Loading...