Every Civilized Person Is French Today

Here is TPM's summary article on the Paris terrorist attacks. As of early Saturday morning (1:10 AM CST) the article seems to be updated every few hours. If it seems out of date, please view the TPM main page. Here is a live stream of France 24 provided by TPM. President Hollande of France has declared a state of emergency and closed the borders. According to reports, all the terrorists who struck in Paris are now dead. For what it's worth, our Department of Homeland Security says there is no credible evidence of a similar threat to the US.

Whatever our nationality, we in the civilized world are all with France in spirit today. I am outraged, disgusted and frankly bereft of hope for civilization every time such an incident happens, hopeless because I cannot see how the nations of the world can survive the terrorists of the world. My heart is with the French... how could it be otherwise... but I know that that is not enough to put an end to the terror. Must the world continue to live with these killings of hundreds or thousands of innocent humans for the rest of human existence on Earth? It is not a pattern I am willing to get used to. My thoughts and prayers, like those of most Americans, are with the French people, particularly with the families of those killed in Paris. Courage, everyone. I do not have any easy answers; we must all awaken tomorrow and face the world we live in.

September 11 Thought: What If They Gave A War And Everybody Came?

As a child born three years to the day after the A-bombing of Hiroshima, I actually asked myself that question once in a while over the years, not as an hypothetical extreme, but as a real possibility. So, I believe, did most American kids who did literal duck-and-cover drills in our elementary school classrooms before we were old enough to understand what we were covering ourselves from.

As the years passed and the details of the consequences of even the smallest nuclear war were filled in for us... anyone else remember a made-for-TV movie titled "The Day After"? ... at least a few teens like me came to see what it meant for the world, especially the part of it divided into "the free world" and "the Commies," if that scenario were ever realized. The weapons to destroy literally all humankind existed; "we" had them; "they" had them... and every time the US and the USSR fought a proxy war, I wondered if it was to be our last encounter.

Fast-forward 25 or more years. Some actual reduction of tension was achieved, to a point at which many of us held some hope that the Cold War need not become hot, at least not right away. Some weapons reductions were actually performed, although both sides still had enough nukes to destroy the "civilized" world several times over. Most of us learned to live with the conflict. Uneasily. Looking over our shoulders every day...

... Except the likes of Ronald Reagan, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, and... Osama bin Laden and his ilk, including Bush Junior. Every nation had its share of nut-jobs willing at least in theory to blow us all to kingdom come in an ultimate ideologically triggered and driven war. I actually knew Americans in the 1980s who would say, out loud, the Russians have these weapons so we have to have more of them. You talk about people unclear on the concept...

Fortunately, I knew damned few ordinary American citizens... and "damned" those few truly were... who actually thought Armageddon was a good idea. As long as those held no leadership positions, there was still some hope that humankind would not be vaporized en masse. But then some of them, not in any real sense power brokers but still determined to have their way, discovered terrorism, and then some opponents of those people discovered they could use the terrorists for their own purposes in projecting the classic "fear, uncertainty and doubt" (FUD) onto understandably concerned and occasionally terrified ordinary individuals, to achieve the effect of their great ultimate ideological battle without having the raw political power to order the necessary ultimate engagement of forces.

Most people, even so, thought it was a crack-brained idea actually to do those things. But "most people" don't always control the disposition of real-world forces... and then there are the utterly crazy people who sometimes do.

We've managed to survive 14 years from Osama bin Laden's attempt at, and of course George W. Bush's collusion in, provoking their respective worlds into indulging in some sort of ultimate engagement of forces. I probably won't live another 14 years, but many of you will.

Can you... please, I urge you... stave off the crazies for at least another 14 years? What with ISIS and all, Armageddon kinda nervous about the direction of things...

Misread Of The Day

... occurred when I glanced at this headline...

American al-Qaeda leaders killed in U.S. counterterror strikes

... and misread it as follows:

American al-Qaeda leaders killed in U.S. COUNTERTENOR strikes

Actually, I think we should try it. Take three of the free world's finest countertenors (i.e., adult male altos) and turn them loose on an Al Qaeda cell...

---

AFTERWORD: Well, that turned out not only to be not humorous, but actually to be tragic: apparently the drone also killed two additional people at the site, one of them American, neither of them Al Qaeda. My thoughts are with the families. And despite my initial joking, I find the entire episode, as now revealed, anything but funny. [/sigh]

UPDATE: Obama apologizes for the American drone strike which killed "[a]n American aid worker and another man held hostage by Al Qaeda". Apparently the CIA had no intelligence (there's a temptation to end the sentence right there) indicating these hostages were present, and thus went forward with the strike.

Bill Would Strip Citizenship Of ‘American Terrorists’

Digby, first quoting TPM inline:

[TPM]
Two arch-conservatives unveiled legislation on Friday to revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone who seeks to join a group designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization.

The Expatriate Terrorist Act, offered by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), amends the Immigration and Nationality Act so as to deny an American passport to — or strip the existing citizenship of — an individual

whom the Secretary has determined is a member, or is attempting to become a member, of an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist pursuant to section 12 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 13 U.S.C. 1189).

"I believe these American terrorists have voluntarily renounced their citizenship upon taking an oath to a foreign terrorist organization (FTO)," King said in a statement.

[Digby]
In case you are wondering why this is considered necessary, I'm guessing it's so that they can deny Americans their rights under the constitution. I would hope that it isn't possible to do this before they are convicted of anything (under the constitution) but once they are, I guess they could be sent to Guantanamo after President Huckabee expands it.

Great... you could be stripped of citizenship without even a trial. And seriously... can an ex post facto application of the law be far behind? An American citizen joins an organization, e.g., an Islamic charity; then the State Department (or FBI?) declares it a terrorist organization...

Two Hostage Situations In/Near Paris Linked — Officials

ABC News has a summary; also a live link. Apparently the brothers want to die as martyrs. Some nearby schools are being evacuated; some are sheltering in place. Matters are volatile at the moment; I hope by the time you read this, it will be all over. Oh, the times we live in...

UPDATE 10:50AM CDT USA Today reports:

PARIS — Two suspects wanted in the deadly terror attack on a satirical newspaper were killed in a police assault Friday north of Paris that coincided with an assault at a second hostage standoff at a kosher supermarket in the capital, according to multiple news sources.

Cherif Kouachi, 32, and his older brother Said, 34, who had been cornered in a printing warehouse in the village of Dammartin-en-Goele, were killed in the operation, according to multiple news sites, including CNN, Le Monde and the AFP news agency,

...

Not many details at the moment. I don't have any details on the second hostage situation, but I haven't stopped looking.

UPDATE a few minutes later: the brothers' hostage is safe.

UPDATE another few minutes later:  the male hostage-taker at the kosher supermarket is dead; his girlfriend is still being sought. Putting aside the aversion of my youth to quoting (or having anything to do with) VoA, that is where I saw it first...

‘Charlie Hebdo’

Terrorists in Paris have attacked Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper which had the [sarcasm] unmitigated gall [/sarcasm] to satirize radical Islam. Two Three masked gunmen, operating with what was called trained military precision and AK‑47 assault rifles, killed 12 people in the newspaper's office, four of them cartoonists who were famous for their lampoons of Islamic subjects, one, the editor of the newspaper. ABC has reported, about an hour or two ago as I write this post, one suspect has surrendered; the other two are at large. Survivors of the attack reported that the terrorists named aloud each person as they killed him or her.

Much to my dismay, the words "terrorist" and "terrorism" have been used in the US to describe any and all kinds of people who attack anyone for any reason, sometimes even to describe political enemies. This is not such a misuse: this is truly terrorism. The gunmen shouted "Allahu akbar" and the equivalent of "We have avenged the prophet Muhammad." They are probably armed and doubtlessly dangerous, wherever they are tonight. The US is not exempt from threats, by these individuals or others associated with them.

One danger is the readiness of some Americans to malign all Muslims for the acts of radical Islamic organizations. Right after 9/11, I knew some Muslims in our apartment complex who quickly emigrated to another country where one had relatives, anticipating the kind of hateful, irrational response the US government mounted under [sarcasm] President Dick Cheney and Vice President George W. Bush [/sarcasm]. I also knew a former friend of Stella's who was prepared to accuse anyone he thought insufficiently Christian (me, for example; I'm a Unitarian Universalist and indeed I am not a Christian) of being a radical Islamist, deserving of imprisonment and/or assault by any red-blooded American.

How can we persuade fear-riddled people, American or French or any other nationality, to refrain from indulging their deepest prejudices against people different from themselves, especially religious people? Intransigent religious extremists are, indeed, among the most dangerous people in the world, and some of them do indeed engage in organized terrorism — but every major religion in the world has such people among their devout followers, and it is simply unjust to assault the nonviolent, more conventional adherents of those faiths. If followed by citizens of every nation and adherents of every religion, that way lies chaos.

Then there's the fundamental matter of free speech. Since the US Supreme Court came to have six (6!) Catholic members, I have given those Catholic Justices a lot of grief in print. Most of my Catholic friends understand my concern with such a ⅔ religious majority on the Court, even if they disagree with me... what about the tiny minority of American Catholics who would be ready and willing to do violence to me for expressing my concerns publicly?

I cannot offer to retract anything I've said, any more than the staff of Charlie Hebdo could retract the sometimes scathing satire that is (was?) their stock-in-trade.

This cannot end well.

My heart is with the French people, and especially the loved ones of the victims of the terrorist attack, on this horrifying day.

ADDENDUM: The gunmen have been identified as French nationals. Heaven help the great nation of France...

---

(And all this is happening on the birthday of my late, much lamented father, Bill Bates. [sigh /])

‘Inadvertence’

The federal government's song-and-dance to avoid any public scrutiny of the charges in a terrorism case in Chicago has danced right outside the pale... and the appeals court is having none of it. Kevin Gosztola of FDL:

A federal appeals court in Chicago ordered a redo of an oral argument in a case where the government filed an appeal against a defendant’s access to secret surveillance records.

Adel Daoud, a young Muslim who was arrested outside a Chicago bar in an undercover FBI sting operation, is charged with “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction” and “attempting to destroy a building by means of an explosive.” A district court judge granted his defense team access to “foreign surveillance materials” under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was unprecedented.

On June 4, the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals held argument on the government’s case for why the district court’s ruling should be reversed. The “public argument” part of the hearing was not recorded.

“By inadvertence, the device that makes a sound recording or the oral arguments of our cases was not turned on for the public argument in this case on Wednesday,” according to a court order issued on June 6. The court scheduled a new argument for June 9.

A do-over was ordered to dispel any perception of corruption.

...

"By inadvertence"? Awwww, gimme a break! If this was not a deliberate attempt to disrupt "a speedy and public trial, I'll eat my Uncle Sam red-white-'n'-blue hat. Clearly there is a policy... a secret policy... that no terrorism trial that comes before the FISA court or any appeal of such a trial will ever allow even the possibility of acquittal, even if that means running a drumhead trial in which the defendant's rights are not merely denied but just plain not even considered.

To repeat myself: this is not the United States of America I grew up in. After W.W.II, even the worst Nazis were subjected to fair trials in international courts. Now, the US will not even protect a terrorism defendant's constitutionally explicitly enumerated due process rights. The entire Obama administration should be ashamed of itself! Ashamed!

Tuesday Cat Porting; Chris Hedges Interviews Lynne Stewart

We are headed out in this awful weather to take our kitty Esther to... get this... an ophthalmologist. The problem with going to a high-priced veterinarian is that they feel free to refer to high-priced specialists located far from home. But it's Stella's kitty and Stella's decision. I'm along for the ride to comfort the cat, and of course Stella.

Lynne Stewart

While I'm gone (most of the day), please read Chris Hedges's article/interview of famous civil liberties/rights activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, who is just recently out of jail after four years of a ten-year prison sentence, released because she has terminal breast cancer. Bluntly speaking, she was imprisoned for doing her job, defending her client in the face of impossible odds and in the face of the PATRIOT Act. She failed to win her case in 1995, but after the infamous 9/11/2001 that was not good enough for John Ashcroft, George W. Bush and their unsavory crew when they came into office: Stewart's client was "Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian Muslim known as 'the Blind Sheikh,' who was convicted in October of that year for alleged involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center."

Stewart's crime, in short, was mounting a vigorous defense of Abdel Rahman when the government was determined to put him away for life... which they did. Stewart was sentenced to 28 months. When Barack Obama was elected president, "a federal appeals court under the Barack Obama administration demanded that the district judge reconsider her sentence. She was handed a new sentence by Koeltl—10 years." Message received: the right to trial by jury no longer extends to everyone, and if our government dislikes the accused, they have no problem taking revenge on his attorney. In this case, the government even used taped conversations between Stewart and Rahman as evidence against Stewart, a practice now legal but previously considered a blatant violation of attorney-client privilege.

This is a story to make you despair for the legitimacy of the judicial system in America. And when the courts become a tool of the executive, there is no more separation of powers... and we have no nation as our founders conceived it.

[Muslim] Terrorist Hijacker Redirected To Different Airport, Foiled By [Orthodox Christian] Security Team

No big deal, right? Happens all the time, right? OK... now SWAP THE TWO BRACKETED DESCRIPTIONS IN THE SUBJECT ABOVE. THAT'S WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. The obvious point: "bad guys" are not always Muslim; Christians are not always "good guys." This should surprise no sensible American... but the operative word is "sensible."

Extraordinary Rendition: It's Not Just A Bush-Cheney Thing

Kevin Gosztola of FDL, yesterday:

Rendition of Libyan Terror Suspect: What If Abu Anas al-Liby Had Nothing to Do With the Embassy Bombings?

By: Kevin Gosztola Monday October 14, 2013 8:11 pm

A Libyan terror suspect kidnapped from Libya in a raid by US special forces on October 5 was transferred from the naval ship, where he was being detained and interrogated, into “law enforcement custody” over the weekend.

The Justice Department indicated in a press release that he was “brought directly to the Southern District of New York, where he has been under indictment for more than a decade.” He was expected to be brought before a judge on October 15.

Al-Liby is suspected of being involved in the bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Last week, a chief federal public defender, David E. Patton, according to the Los Angeles Times, had pressed a federal judge to order that he be “brought to court immediately,” as he was aboard a ship being interrogated by the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which is a special task force of personnel from the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and other agencies. He had not been read Miranda rights, which he and other terror suspects have a right to be read if they are being prosecuted under US law. But a federal judge would not issue such an order and would not appoint a defense lawyer to represent him either.

A more critical issue is that al-Liby, whose real name is Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, may not be the dangerous al Qaeda terrorist the United States government believes he happens to be.

...

Please read the rest of Gosztola's post. It is a case study in our government's unconstitutional (indeed un-American) actions in extraordinary rendition cases.

I have read the Bill of Rights many times. I skimmed it one more time before writing this post. And with the possible exception of the 10^th Amendment (and it's hard to tell on that one), none of the enumerated rights apply only to US citizens. In particular, in this case, foreigners retain judicial due process rights as surely as citizens.

In spite of this, we see extraordinary rendition inflicted not merely by the admittedly evil George W. Bush and Dick Cheney but also by the allegedly more moderate Barack Obama. Refusing to read Miranda rights as a protection of due process? moderate? refusing to appoint a defense attorney? moderate? Not hardly! Our nation's founders are surely spinning in their graves.

And remember, this is process for a man who appears (to some people at least) to be trying to cooperate with the government... to be sure, acting in his own best interest (that's his right), and possibly having been a terrorist (that's to be determined by trial, not merely assumed without trial), but apparently trying to cooperate.

If our courts begin abducting people who are trying to cooperate (perhaps to prevent their testimony?), if our courts begin denying due process rights (guaranteed by our Constitution not just to citizens, but to people in general when under US jurisdiction), what possible confidence can we have that they will not turn the same extreme measures against American citizens when they find it convenient? And... what a time to decide to do this, while most of us are distracted by the government shutdown!

Niemöller nailed it in 1946, though he was speaking about German Nazis... in one variant, "First they came for the Jews..." Well, now they're coming for the alleged terrorists, and I'm damned if I will remain silent. Even a terrorist deserves a fair trial. Even a terrorist deserves a defense attorney.

UPDATE: from an AP article:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Four years after his failed effort to bring the 9/11 mastermind to New York for trial, President Barack Obama has reinstated the federal courthouse as America's preferred venue for prosecuting suspected terrorists.

His administration has done so by quietly securing conviction after conviction in the civilian judicial system. Meanwhile at Guantanamo Bay, admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's case moves at a snail's pace.

...

Right. It's amazing how many convictions you can obtain if you refuse to appoint a defense attorney...

Choosing Amputation

Please read this well-written and very informative AP story (now there's something you don't see every day) on TPM about Heather Abbott, a woman who lost her left foot as a result of irreparable damage from one of the explosions in Boston. She seems very courageous to me. Though I had no traumatic incident... an infection led to the amputation of my already deformed foot... much of what she describes seems familiar to me; our decision processes were similar. With Mrs. Abbott's clear thinking and positive outlook, I expect to read another story about her return to reasonable health in, say, four months or so. And when I do, I shall stand up and applaud. Courage, Mrs. Abbott; courage and strength!

Res Miranda

Source: Wikipedia

The phrase usually means "a wondrous thing," and is familiar to me from its appearance in a glorious English Christmas carol from about 1420, There Is No Rose of Swich Vertu (i.e., in our English, Such Virtue). Apparently there are no musicologists or Mary-worshippers in the Obama administration's DoJ, and in cases of alleged terrorism, they have decided it is unnecessary to give Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda warning, apprising him of his rights before questioning him about his alleged crimes.

This refusal violates even the Obama administration's own policy, first put forward in 2009 or 2010 in two cases of alleged terrorism, that such refusal to Miranda-ize (yes, "Miranda" has been verbed; no, I didn't do it first, because "verbing weirds language") is valid only if authorities are confronted with an ongoing threat to public safety. However horrific the Boston bombings were, it is difficult to make the case that the danger to the public is ongoing: one suspect is dead, the other is in custody, and no more bombs have been found.

For a presidential administration or its Justice Department, there is no more effective way to involve the ACLU promptly in a legal case than to violate, deliberately and publicly, the findings of the US Supreme Court. In this instance, the reference is to the 1966 case Miranda v. Arizona, and the issue at stake is a defendant's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination:

... The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that they have the right to remain silent, and that anything the person says will be used against that person in court; the person must be clearly informed that they have the right to consult with an attorney and to have that attorney present during questioning, and that, if they are indigent, an attorney will be provided at no cost to represent them.

And indeed the ACLU is jumping right in. From the above-linked TPM article:

The American Civil Liberties Union said the public safety exemption is invalid in this case. “Every criminal defendant is entitled to be read Miranda rights,” said ACLU director Anthony Romero. “The public safety exception should be read narrowly. It applies only when there is a continued threat to public safety and is not an open-ended exception to the Miranda rule.”

It doesn't get much more straightforward than that.

We'll see what happens, but I have a bad feeling that this could well jeopardize the prosecution of a defendant who might otherwise be nailed to the wall without much trouble.

(Damn. The man still looks like a child to me. I know; I know: children don't build and deploy bombs...)

" 'Once The Rockets Are Up...' "

" '... who cares where they come down; / That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."

V‑2 Replica,
Peenemünde

Thus sang the incomparable Tom Lehrer in a deeply bitter song (YouTube) about the infliction of more than 3,000 V‑2 rockets by Nazi Germany on five nations (Belgium, UK, France, Netherlands, and Germany itself), starting in September 1944 and continuing for several months. The fatalities were not heavy... in London, each V‑2 killed on average two people... but the effect was terrifying, and there was basically nothing the Allies could do in response, except to pursue the European war effort as vigorously as possible. I have been reading Studs Terkel's "The Good War" (quotes are a part of the title), especially interviews regarding Londoners' reaction to the V‑2 strikes, and it is clear that for all the people's courage, the V‑2 was a terrorist's weapon, as surely as an IED or other homemade bomb today. And Wernher and company were therefore terrorists.

Predator Drone

Today, the US military, and two US presidents so far, are distressingly fond of UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, "drones" for short. Drones in one form or another have been around since 1916, and, again in one form or another, in actual use since the Vietnam War. Today's drones, UASs (unmanned aircraft systems, including ground control), in use since 2005, piloted remotely from the battlefield (if indeed a battlefield is involved at all), launching missiles at ground targets, are less than precise in their targeting:

... Since 2006, drone-launched missiles allegedly had killed between 750 and 1,000 people in Pakistan, according to the report. Of these, about 20 people were said to be leaders of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and associated groups. Overall, 66% to 68% of the people killed were militants, and 31% to 33% were civilians. US officials disputed the percentage for civilians.^[29] ...

You can find most any value you want for the percentage civilians killed, depending on the political views of a given web site's author, but there is little dispute among non-US-government sources that the number is relatively high. It almost seems at times as if any person killed by a missile launched from an American drone is automatically classified as a "militant," and how are they to defend their names? Many of the civilians have been killed while going about their daily business, not participating in any hostile activity... in one well-known incident, a wedding party was attacked, killing 37 people, mostly women and (more than half) children. Given the imprecision of remotely piloted drone attacks and the (relatively) small numbers of people killed, the UAV is ultimately a terrorist's weapon. And hence Barry and company are terrorists.

Eventually, Wernher von Braun became one of "our boys," and his image was rehabilitated for public consumption. (Clearly, Tom Lehrer didn't get that memo.) The question is whether Barack Obama, who is not a bad human being, can be made to see that engaging in terrorism makes one a terrorist, no matter how virtuous one's person, no matter how noble one's cause. Every child needlessly killed in a drone attack is not only a moral atrocity but also a motivation for future terrorist attacks against the US, and I for one will not be surprised when they happen. If Mr. Obama wins a second term (which I sincerely hope he does, because his opponent is a man of no virtue whatsoever that I can perceive), we have to begin his reeducation in the content of the Geneva Conventions and the limits of warfare to which any civilized nation must be subject. As he is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, perhaps we can hope for the best. [/mild irony]

ADDED: worth reading is Glenn Greenwald's New Stanford/NYU study documents the civilian terror from Obama's drones.

Ninth Guantánamo Prisoner Dies, Apparently W/O Charge Or Trial

Obama enthusiasts, please note that four (4) of the prisoners died during Obama's presidency. He promised to close Guantánamo, and did not, apparently for political reasons. So their deaths are on his hands. (Would Rmoney have done differently? Oh, gimme a fucking break. Of course not.)

Here's the statement posted on FDL by Center for Constitutional Rights:

Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released the following statement in response to the news that a ninth man has died in detention at Guantánamo.

With great sadness, the Center for Constitutional Rights condemns the fact that yet another detained man – the fourth on President Obama’s watch – has died at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, most likely without charge and certainly without trial. Neither the name of the man nor the details of his death have yet been released by the Department of Defense. Whatever the cause turns out to be, it is clear that the United States government is ultimately responsible for his death.

Military investigations into several of the deaths at the base remain under a cloud of suspicion; and the Center’s clients, families of two men who died there in 2006, never got their day in court or the chance to know the truth about what happened to their sons. The Center for Constitutional Rights calls on the government to preserve the evidence in this case, conduct a full and impartial investigation, and treat the body and the family with all proper respect, none of which, regrettably, has consistently occurred in the past.

More than half the men remaining at Guantánamo have been cleared for transfer but remain imprisoned, trapped by politics. Whether because of despair, suicide or natural causes, as Guantánamo enters its 11th year of operation – 11 years of indefinite detention without trial or prospect of release – death has become an inevitable consequence of President Obama’s failure to close the prison.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has led the legal battle over Guantánamo for the last 10 years – representing clients in two Supreme Court cases and organizing and coordinating hundreds of pro bono lawyers across the country, ensuring that nearly all the men detained at Guantánamo have had the option of legal representation. Among other Guantánamo cases, the Center represents the families of men who died at Guantánamo, and men who have been released and are seeking justice in international courts. In addition, CCR has been working through diplomatic channels to resettle men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. Visit www.ccrjustice.org. Follow @theCCR.

(Bolds mine.)

The awful thing that happened on 9/11/2001 can in no way justify the United States's flagrant disregard of anyone's basic human rights and civil liberties. (If you think otherwise, you have clearly not thought the matter through. Please go away and think some more. You are welcome on this site when you change your mind... not sooner.) Retaining people in Gitmo who have been cleared for release... people perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time, people sold out to an America willing to pay money to those who turn in "terrorists" ... is itself an atrocity. America should close Guantánamo and go home. Until it does, America allows a gaping wound to fester, a wound that will motivate future terrorists. The choice is (at least in theory) ours to make: close Guantánamo, or live our national life constantly looking over our shoulder. Guantánamo should be closed today. Yes, I am aware of the obstacles... but the real problem is a lack of motivation on the part of our leaders of both parties. Enough is enough. Either we can advocate human rights, or we can keep Guantánamo open. We can't do both.

UN Investigator: Drone Strikes UndermineInternational Law

Who could have imagined! [/snark] Sending remotely piloted bombs to destroy targeted individuals far from a combat zone, "incidentally" killing dozens of people whose only crime was being there, often following up with a second flying bomb to obliterate anyone arriving to provide medical aid... who could possibly object to that? [/snark] A UN investigator, that's who. Here's Owen Bowcott of The Guardian:

The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.

Someone please explain to me how America's ostensibly targeted drone warfare differs from Germany's W.W.II actions in lobbing rockets into London.

It seems, in every generation, at least one nation discovers some means of "hands‑free" or "no‑risk" remote warfare, some human rights nightmare that does not trouble the sleep of one or another self-satisfied national leader. And so the atrocities never end. Drones are America's contribution to this horrific idiom.

NSA FOIA Release Of CIA Docs: Bad News For Bush

Via Bryan of Why Now?, we are directed to the following info about the 120 CIA docs just released by the NSA under an FOIA request. From Jordan Michael Smith at Salon:

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

... Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

... The Pentagon approved the plan for surveillance purposes.

And yet, simultaneously, the CIA declared that budget concerns were forcing it to move its Counterterrorism Center/Osama bin Laden Unit from an “offensive” to a “defensive” posture. ...

...

So tell me again... just how are Republicans better than Democrats at counterterrorism? It seems to me that Bush administration's truly terrible judgment allowed this to happen despite an effective initial effort by the intelligence community. And now we have Republican asswipes blaming Democrats for 9/11. What a large, steaming pile.

The worst of it is that the release of these documents will change nothing. The MSM will not cover them, or will give them a single segment and then move on. Most Americans who would vote Republican in the first place will never hear of these documents, or will blame the source, or will find some other crack-brained way to defend their incompetent, negligent heroes. This should be an earth-shaking release... but it won't be even a tremor.

Remember Habeas Corpus? Remember Boumediene vs. Bush?

Apparently, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals doesn't remember either of those things, and even the Supreme Court's memories are... selective. Here's Ryan Cooper at Washington Monthly:

Back in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which abolished habeas corpus rights for noncitizens, among other things. This part of the law was overturned in 2008 by the Supreme Court in Boumedi[e]ne vs. Bush as unconstitutional.

Today, it looks like the Supreme Court gave up on that line of reasoning. Marcy Wheeler reports:

SCOTUS has just declined to take all seven of the pending Gitmo habeas corpus petitions, including Latif and Uthman.

This effectively kills habeas corpus.

The problem here, as Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer puts it, is that the “conservative judges on the D.C. Circuit have interpreted the law in a way that assumes many of the government’s claims are true and don’t have to be proven in court.” Or as the Center for Constitutional Rights puts it:

Today’s decision leaves the fate of detainees in the hands of a hostile D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has erected innumerable, unjustified legal obstacles that have made it practically impossible for a detainee to win a habeas case in the trial courts. The D.C. Circuit, the country’s most conservative court of appeals, has reversed every detainee victory appealed to it by the government, and as consequence, district courts in D.C. have ruled in favor of detainees in only one of the last 12 cases before them.

(Ryan Cooper offers examples after that.)

This is really bad news. The right of habeas corpus predates the founding of America by several hundred years, and denying habeas is one way to remove a major burden of proof from the government that there is a reason the accused should be detained. It is only a slight stretch to say that detainees denied habeas start out already halfway to "guilty". The Supreme Court has indeed ruled on this matter in Boumediene, but it appears the federal courts, including the Supremes, are going to wink and look the other way at violations against alleged terrorists.

No matter how badly you want a conviction of an actual terrorist, if you accept the tweaking of the most ancient aspects of our system of justice, those tweaks will bite you in the butt someday. Either everyone, citizen and noncitizen, receives due process, or no one, citizen or noncitizen, truly enjoys due process rights. "Splitting the difference" just because it's a terrorism case is, quite simply, un-American.

The most regrettable aspect is that so many Americans... Democrats included; mark my words... are perfectly content to allow this kind of rigging of trials to make sure every alleged terrorist is convicted. I know such a person, a friend of Stella's, a Democrat, a baby-boomer, Jewish; i.e., someone who remembers what happened to Jews in the Holocaust... and she is still just fine with this kind of tampering with justice in terrorism cases.

I predict that all significant due-process rights will be effectively dead no later than the 2016 presidential elections... no matter who is elected President this November. We're screwed.

Obama And 'The Church Of St. Drone'

Tom Engelhardt explains:

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self -- are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially. Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” In other words, it was essentially an administration-inspired piece -- columnist Robert Scheer calls it “planted” -- on a “secret” program the president and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.

...

(More links available in original.)

Obama seems determined to make it as difficult as possible for me to vote for him. Each new revelation about his supposed counterterrorism efforts involves still more human rights violations. I am down to advocating, for the first time in many presidential elections, voting for the lesser of two evils. But this kind of behavior is still undeniably evil, and I hate supporting it even with one vote, even considering the truly horrifying alternative in Mitt Rmoney.