DOJ Report On NSA Wiretaps Finally Released 174
oliphaunt writes "As regular readers will recall, after the 2004 elections the New York Times revealed that the NSA had been conducting illegal wiretaps of American citizens since early 2001. Over the course of the next four years, more information about the illegal program trickled out, leading to several lawsuits against the government and various officials involved in its implementation. This week several of these matters are coming to a head: Yesterday, the lawyers for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation filed a motion for summary judgment in their lawsuit against the Obama DOJ. The motion begins by quoting a statement made by Candidate Obama in 2007, acknowledging that the warrantless wiretap program was illegal. US District Judge Vaughn Walker has given indications that he is increasingly skeptical of the government's arguments in this case. In what might just be a coincidence of timing, today the long-awaited report from the DOJ inspector general to the US Congress about the wiretapping program was declassified and released. Emptywheel has the beginnings of a working thread going here."
Now That This IS Sanctioned By Law (Score:1)
It's the last whitewash report we expect to receive on the matter.
See you in Baghram!
Ah yes (Score:5, Informative)
The Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.....based in Saudi Arabia, tied to Al-Qaeda and banned by the United Nations Security Council Committee 1267.
http://www.un.org/sc/committees/1267/ [un.org]
Ah yes (Score:5, Insightful)
American lawyers.... based in America, and protected by the Constitution no matter how fast the Republicans spin the word "People".
The lawyers are the aggrieved party here, having received a copy of their own wiretap in the mail and therefore being the only people outside of the government able to prove that these wiretaps occurred. That they just happen to be lawyers for an Islamic foundation that gives all its money to a bunch of murderers would be a good reason to put in a request for a warrant from the secret FISA court that rubber-stamped almost every single request ever, shame Bush's administration just couldn't be bothered to obey the law.
Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Insightful)
See my other post in this thread. Not all of al-Haramain's money went to al-Qaida. A lot of it went to very poor people for food, education, or health care. Only a small minority of it was skimmed by a few sympathizers.
That's the problem with the guilt-by-association game. If you're a large charity and any one of your employees helps al-Qaida, your whole charity's image is permanently tarnished, even if your employee was acting outside of official capacity.
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that gives all its money to a bunch of murderer
First of all, I do thing that Al-Quaeda is a bunch of crimial assholes.
But let's be objective for a minute:
You are paying how many taxes to the US government?
And how much of that budget goes into the war budget?
And how many people were killed by US soldiers because of that war? (Hind: A multiple of that of all terrorist attacks ever.)
So by your own definition you are not much better than that foundation, are you?
Now you might say that this as an unfair comparison, because the people that are killed by US so
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Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Informative)
What do you think makes taping the phone call "unreasonable"?
The constitution.
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Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Insightful)
"Don't throw the Constitution in my face anymore. The Constitution is just a Goddamn piece of paper."
::facepalm::
Long story short: It's the fake quote that just won't die.
According to Google, the last time I bothered to rebut it was March 2008:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496572&no_d2=1&cid=22832270 [slashdot.org]
And in that post, I reference an earlier post I made in Oct 2006.
Nothing has changed since then.
While I realize that quote has taken on the mantle of Truthiness in its condemnation of Bush Era policies,
and it now represents the general spirit of lawlessness, it'd be better to find something true to use as a cudgel.
"I'm the decider, and I decide what's best" would be a good place to start.
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Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Yes, I expect the government to go before a judge and ask if they can wiretap a foreign target, because that's how we make sure they aren't wiretapping domestic targets. Remember, once they have the warrant, they don't need to ask a judge anymore.
2) Even if they're so lazy that they can't bother to get warrants for wiretapping known terrorists, there's still the emergency retroactive warrants.
3) Even Pentagon officials admit that the "charity" spent the majority of its money feeding hungry people, teaching poor people, and helping sick people. Only a small portion of it was skimmed by a few terrorist sympathizers who infiltrated the charity.
4) Actually, we don't let them continue to campaign. We had many of their branches in foreign countries shut down.
5) Do you seriously think that a handful of fools wearing sandals and turbans who hide in caves are going to take down 300 million people? Can you imagine the size of the force that would be needed to invade American soil? It's moot, anyway, because you're more likely to die of colon cancer in Wisconsin than you are to die from a terrorist attack.
6) ...it's lose, not loose.
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I agree the threat has been blown out of all proportion [ombwatch.org], 65yrs in jail for charity work is nothing short of barbaric.
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Okay. Now, they need more guns than us. Considering that the US spends about as much on defense as the rest of the nations on Earth, I don't think that will be a problem.
Then, how do they get here?
By airplane? I think it would cost a lot of money to fly a sufficiently large force across the oceans.
By car? The ocean makes that a bit difficult.
By sea? We could see them coming a mile away.
What if they nuke us, or engage in chemical warfare? I think that would be on a fairly limited scale, given the size
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When I read 2.190-2.193, the impression I get is "you can kill people who try to kill you,", especially given 2.192. That seems like a reasonable thing, and certainly not "go kill people who aren't Muslims".
As far as the other quote, I'm not sure there's enough context to properly judge the sentiment there. But I remember reading an interview with an Iranian cleric whose brother is secular. His reply was lengthy and surprisingly rational; here's an excerpt [blogspot.com].
We will only fight those who are enemies of huma
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I knew you would correctly point out the context is war. This war is against unbelievers, infidels, us specificly.
They mention specifically slaying people who attack their mosques, and how they're only hostile to oppressors.
That's all the context there is.
That's all the context a Westerner like you or I see. I bet there's more to it, if we had proper knowledge of their culture.
He says the same thing as the British Mullah "I will never have conflict with my brother."
That is not what was said. The context o
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We should continue this in email before the comment section of this article closes. For my gmail account name is the same as my slashdot account name.
Then what is the context? Don't say there is more context if you do not know. Say, "I don't know."
If you read what I said, there's conditionals like "if", "bet", etc. I don't know their culture at all, and I don't feel like taking the time to learn it. The difference between you and I is that I assume there is more context because in my experience with old
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They would need access to a lot of nuclear weapons, which are pretty costly. Iran hasn't even made one bomb yet, let alone many, and North Korea's economy is supported by their weapons programs so they certainly aren't giving out nukes for free.
But, let's say they take out one American city. Katrina beat them to it already, but life moved on pretty well for the rest of the country.
Two? Well, Japan survived after we took out two of their cities with nuclear weapons.
To take multiplie cities, you'd need to
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People who love money that much aren't going to waste it all just to destroy someone they don't like. If they mismanaged the hell out of things, they just lost all their cash that they used to buy the country.
The Saudis have a vested interest in our economy. So does China. Without the US economy to drive, the price of oil would plummet, and China wouldn't have anyone to sell their stuff to. In fact, I would wager that most wealthy people are wealthy because of the US and they aren't going to waste their
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If someone hated us so much and had that much spare wealth, it'd be easier for them to buy a black market nuke and donate it to al-Qaida than it would be to try and buy a majority ownership in enough companies to cause us severe harm.
Your condescending tone ("my boy", "you don't understand", etc) combined with the conspiracy theory attitude at the end ("I want you to think about this") reduce the impact of any message you wanted to deliver.
Individual human nature might drive individuals to do some crazy thi
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On the one hand, you say that someone won't destroy their own worth in order to kill their enemies. Mind you, if you waste your wealth on leveling people you don't like, you won't be able to take care of your loved ones anymore, and you will still end up ruining the lives of innocent people.
Then, on the other hand, you turn around and say that they won't give a nuclear weapon away to destroy those same enemies, because it might hurt the ones they love and kill innocent people.
You sound like a conspiracy th
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Oops, I meant to say "On the one hand, you say that someone will destroy their own worth in order to kill their enemies."
Re:Ah yes (Score:4, Interesting)
So ... you think the NSA should call back to the states to ask a judge "mother may I?" when one of their foreign, hostile targets gets a phone call, just in case it's an American lawyer calling
So ... you think the government is too stupid to find the other end of the wire? (Well, they did manage to mail the transcript there...) Maybe you think they're too lazy to bother with all that dumb paperwork? (Well, there were all those wiretaps that were cancelled because the phone company didn't get paid...) Maybe you think they're ignorant of the FISA law allowing them to take several days AFTER the wiretap to call back and ask a judge? (Well, YOU certainly are!)
Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Insightful)
But hey, anything goes, right?
Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Insightful)
The preception by the administration was that it was a legal manner.
Your sort of arm chair quarterbacking here and using the later presumption of not being legal to invalidate the entire idea of thinking it was legal at the time it was done. Let's see if I can put this in a car analogy, if you checked your blindspot and thought it was safe to change lanes only to find later the you missed a car and hit it when changing lanes, did you act maliciously and intentionally to hit the car or did you think you were being legal and safe but erred?
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In the eyes of the law, it wouldn't have mattered, you were still at fault and liable for damages. Especially if you claimed you checked your blindspot and missed them, since that implies that you weren't paying close enough attention.
Similarly, in the eyes of the law, it doesn't matter that they 'thought' it was legal. Legal in this instance being them going to their lawyers and saying "I want you to tell me this is legal so I can claim I was told it was legal". It only matters if it actually were legal.
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Yes, but your not looking at the context. You are at fault if you hit someone. If it is an accident, you pay a fine and move on. If you hit the person intentionally, you are then charge with vehicular assault and face fail time.
The point is that the administration was under
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It doesn't matter whether you were malicious or merely erred, you were still at fault and should be held accountable for your actions.
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It certainly does matter. Accidents are usually minor misdemeanors and don't carry any jail time. If it was malicious, then it can be a felony carrying several years in prison.
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No, I'm not confusing them, I'm stating that there are different laws you can be charged with because the action is then different. If the action is unintentional, the charge is one thing, if the action is intentional, then you are charge with another. This is because the action became separate offenses even though the mechanics were the same.
This is only impotent to the conversation because if you think you are doing something legally, and it turns out you were wrong, then saying you should have done it le
Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Insightful)
For the car analogy, if you pasted a picture of a nice, clear road onto your rearview mirror, and, after carefully checking that, hit another vehicle, it'd be all kinds of your fault.
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Or had your drunk 6-year-old child change lanes with his eyes closed. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty apt description of the way the Bushies ran the country.
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The administration got a hack lawyer to say it was legal. It was so hacky that other administration officials who came on board later had no choice but to revoke the legal justifications used for the program. Any legitimate legal scholar who reads that opinion will point out that it's complete bullshit (it makes me wonder how many people they had to ask before they found one who would write the bullshit they wanted to hear)
Allow me to extend your analogy. You ask your passenger to tell you there's no one
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Presumed legal, indeed.
If you want to pick nits about the definition of legal, then how about this. They could have gotten wiretaps that were consistent with the statutory law passed by the legislative branch and upheld by the judicial branch, rather than using some half-baked Unitary Executive Theory to justify ignoring clear case law and legislation involving national security wiretaps.
Normally, OLC opinions are peer-reviewed; this one was not. Even the head of OLC was unaware of this memo; it's that se
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Looks like the administration didn't check their blindspot as well as you think. [nytimes.com] It appears that the wiretapping program was approved in the same way most decisions in the administration were approved. They made their decisions, then cherrypicked the evidence and strongarmed those that disagreed with those decisions.
From the linked article:
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And your point is what? Did they or did they not assume the program was legal until it was determined not to be?
The op I respondid to said if those guy were so bad, they could have gotten a legal tap. Well, when that tap was made, they thought it was legal so the in effect did get a legal tap.
I'm in no way arguing their innocence with the comment. I'm stating that if something was thought to of been legal, no matter how they reached that conclusion, they were getting a legal tap even though later they found
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That's absolutely, completely wrong. So very, very, very, very, very wrong. Whether or not you *believe* something to be illegal has no effect on whether it *is* legal, even if you're the president. And even if they acted in good faith, they can't use that defense because they didn't have a proper inquiry as to the legality o
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You are so wrong here is isn't funny. Where you are wrong is in the perception, the law has nothing at all to do with it. If a person a person does X believi
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You fail in knowing the facts. The islamic group in question was tapped before the program was known to the public and considered illegal. This has nothing to do with the overall legality of the TSP or any right or wrong you are attempting to assign to it. When the op say's they could have gotten a legal tap, the problem is that they thought or was working under the assumption that it was a fucking legal tap. You cannot say they should have done X when they thought they were doing X and it turned out later
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I followed the parent links up, it seems as you were responding to me. I am the guy you responded to and yes, I meant what I said.
And unless someone specifically involved with the ad
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The government gets a legal opinion on almost everything it does which isn't already being done. This is a response to lawsuits over existing actions in the past. You may find it hard to believe, but there were actual legal opinions written before specific battles in both current wars. We are at war and needed or actually got a legal opinion to find if we were justified in engaging and killing the enemy.
Don't take the legal opinion to mean more then what it means. It's called cover your ass and this is not
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Well then ask him and quit speculating and assigning malice with nothing more then your biased opinion. Fuck, the entire thread is about what they claimed they thought, not about what you want to think they thought. Get over yourself.
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I don't believe I said that and I don't believe John Woo said that either. OF course if he has access to the administration and high level officials in the act of doing his daily job, he is not just another lawyer. And as for the obsolete, I believe his full comment was about fighting a war with enemies not traditionally defined, it becomes obsolete and not applicable.
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No, laws that were designed for one thing don't apply when the situation has change and that one thing is now something different and conflict with the constitutional role of a branch of government. That is what Woo said. Now quit putting your own damn bias on it, only paying attention to what you think supports your ideals, and effectivly coming up with something else.
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And your point is what? I never said his particular theory was right or wrong, just that the concept is well established and in practice today.
Actually, no, it is not a crack pot theory. In fact, there is so much support for the theory
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No it does not violate the constitution. Here is a prime example of where you have no fucking clue. First of all, the constitution never applied to phone conversations until 1968. And in the ruling that made it
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No idiot. One more time, because his opinions were called insane, it does not indicate malice. Get it straight this time. You have no proof o
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No, lack of prosecution implies legitimacy. It's two entirely different concepts. You should learn about them.
Who really cares, and yes, there was quite a few republicans claiming the programs were illegal too. Again, you are acting like something i
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But the pattern only exists in your head with the malice applied. You are imposing it because of your worldviews. If you did not do so, everything can easily be explained away by ignorance and a desire to aid the countries safety. Seriously, what does the administration have to gain by the TSP other then securing the safety of the country? You can't point to any other agenda then that.
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You are conflating a statement made with the TSP program as if it was one and the same. They aren't. The TSP and the warrantless wiretaps were between international calls in which one person was believed to have been a terrorist or had connections to terrorist. Echelon and magic lantern already do what he said needed to be done and both have been shown to be legal by all the challenges
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The preception by the administration was that it was a legal manner. Your sort of arm chair quarterbacking here and using the later presumption of not being legal to invalidate the entire idea of thinking it was legal at the time it was done. Let's see if I can put this in a car analogy, if you checked your blindspot and thought it was safe to change lanes only to find later the you missed a car and hit it when changing lanes, did you act maliciously and intentionally to hit the car or did you think you w
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if you checked your blindspot and thought it was safe to change lanes only to find later the you missed a car and hit it when changing lanes, did you act maliciously and intentionally to hit the car or did you think you were being legal and safe but erred?
Better analogy: Suppose you are a surgeon who wants to perform a dangerous operation. You start asking other surgeons to back up your decision, and promise them the most prestigious position in their specialty if they do. Suppose you find a surgeon who acc
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I understand what you are saying but the question comes down to, at the time, did the surgeon believe he had a right to do the job or not. Even if he found the right somewhere and made arrangements to cover it up if something went wrong, the fact is he still believed he had a right to do the procedure.
So in the context of the parent post (not law or right or wrong or anything), saying that he should have done it legally would have resulted in the same exact actions because bush initially believed it to be l
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Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Especially for the number one cop in the number one country.
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I never said ignorance of the law was an excuse. What I said is given the option of being legal or not, the same decisions would have been made. It's a matter of only knowing what they knew then and not knowing what we know now. If Bush thought he was acting legally, then saying he should have did it legally would have resulted in the same exact actions happening given what he claims to of known at the time.
As I said in the previous post, in the context of the op and not the law or morals or anything, the a
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That would require you to know the thoughts of the president at the stages of the program(s). You can't know that unless you are a magic mind reader or that he admits to it somehow and that information is passed back to you. Therefore, you are operating in pure speculation and attempting to impose malice over ignorance.
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There is this principle of reason behind actions. If you combine that with the mindset of ideology, you find some pretty fucked up reasoning. A drug dealer find a way to create a new (synthetic?) drug that mimics cocaine or methamphetamine but escapes all the current current laws prohibiting those drugs either by chemical composition or the lack of specific ingredients, it he acting legally when he finds that it isn't in violation of any laws or is he purposely subverting the law by acting illegally? Please
Re:Ah yes (Score:5, Informative)
Right, because it's okay to violate the rights of bad guys. We never, ever get the "bad guy" designation wrong. Just ask Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil [mcclatchydc.com]
It's not like the vast majority of the donations to al-Haramain went to feed hungry Somalis, teach poor Indonesians, or help sick Kenyans [cbsnews.com]. It couldn't possibly be that there were a few sympathizers working in al-Haramain were skimming the money for al-Qaida.
No, no, no, we don't care about any of that. Some very, very important people tell us that these other people are evil, so why should we care if their rights get trampled on? They're only terrorists, just like Wakil.
The Big Question is: (Score:1)
Re:The Big Question is: (Score:5, Funny)
Campaign promises? (Score:5, Informative)
There's no way on earth a judge is going to hold that a statement made on a campaign is anything binding. If he were to, Obama would be utterly buried in lawsuits, as would every other president.
Re:Campaign promises? (Score:5, Insightful)
And this would be a bad thing?
Re:Campaign promises? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because the president is supposed to lead the country, not waste taxpayer money every time somebody has a real or imagined beef with the federal government. If you want to change the government, the Constitution has these things called "elections", not "lawsuits". I don't even agree with Obama on most topics, and I'm 100% convinced that his expansions of the federal government that Slashdot seems to completely approve of will have a vastly higher negative impact on my individual rights than the hypothetical outrage that people here feel that somebody in Al Queda might have had his "right to privacy" intruded upon. However, the proper way for me to affect change in the government is not by suing every time they adopt a policy I don't agree with.
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s/affect/effect near the end there... preemptive grammar strike.
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No one is suggesting that the president should be open to a lawsuit over every minor disagreement over how the government is run. It makes perfect sense, however, that all politicians--the president included--should be held liable for the promises they make during their campaigns, to at least the same extent that commercial entities are held liable for their advertising promises. Promising something to get elected and failing to carry out that promise afterward can reasonably be considered a form of fraud.
A
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Promising something to get elected and failing to carry out that promise afterward can reasonably be considered a form of fraud.
Only if one is a simpleton.
Re:Campaign promises? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because the president is supposed to lead the country
Does anyone remember when we elected people to represent us, not to lead us?
Re:Campaign promises? (Score:4, Informative)
Does anyone remember when we elected people to represent us, not to lead us?
No, I don't remember, from my life or from history. The President has always been Leader, not representative. Do you think the people voted General George Washington to represent or to lead the nation? We vote for Congressmen, aka Representatives, to represent our interests in creating the law that governs us. We vote for Presidents to lead the nation, to guide its direction in war or peace. You vote for a leader you think is capable of the task, and who wants to lead the country in a direction you want to go. They're the Executive both in name and in terms of the powers granted them in our Constitution. That's what President means -- leader of the Republic.
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In America we have no leaders. We lead ourselves.
Sovereign (n.)
1 a: one possessing or held to possess sovereignty b: one that exercises supreme authority within a limited sphere c: an acknowledged leader : arbiter
I am a Sovereign Individual, not Obama's subject. You can be a subject if you like.
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Oh please. And when I was a Boy Scout Patrol Leader, that made the other scouts my Subjects who'd sacrificed their self-determinacy to me. That you had to specifically pluck a word from the dictionary with the connotation you want just proves how vacuous the argument is. The President isn't a King, that's why he can't just order the people around. There are different types of leader [reference.com] than just sovereigns.
Oh, so McCain was a free choice? NOT (Score:2)
Elections do not change our government. In the last election we had the choice of continuing Bush's foreign policy OR continuing Bush's foreign policy with nicer rhetoric. We had the choice of bailing out our economy with favours to those corporations that favour fascism or bailing out our economy with favours to those corporations that favour socialism. We basically had the choice of Bush the third in white or Bush the third in black.
They don't let us vote on real change, allowing the people a choice on th
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With your mention of the constitution, I would think you wouldn't have to put "right to privacy" in quotes. Illegal wiretaps are a clear violation of "the right of the people to be secure...from unreasonable searches", and are due more than hypothetical outrage.
Our presidents take an oath and are bound by the constitution, and if we don't hold them to that, we deserve the government we get.
You seem to imply that the proper way to effect change is to wait until the next election and vote the
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I don't think the intent is to make the promise binding on this case. I think the intent is to make Obama look like a hypocrite in front of the whole world. The problem isn't with this judge, it's with the Obama administration's approach to dealing with the wholesale criminality of their predecessors. People can try to change that policy by winning lawsuits, or they can try to change it by shaming Obama into actually sacking up and doing something about it. This case just presents a nice opportunity to
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Obama can't do anything legally. Public officials are pretty much exculpated from acts done in good faith in public office. Breaking a law to avoid a death is a common excuse to violate the law. For instance, it you jaywalk in order to pull a small child out of the street, should you be cited. If you are, a legal principle called "necessity" would get you out of the fine. It's illegal to shoot someone, illegal to discharge a firearm within so many feet of a dwelling and illegal to discharge a firearm within
From the old mathematics joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced legal analysis including legislation, lobbying, and litigation. If you'd like a circular describing these research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your lawyer, and ask for one!"
- With apologies to any crypto geeks who got hired by talking to their grandmothers about mathematics on an open line :)
We told our lawyers to tell us it was legal... (Score:2, Insightful)
Comes down to the same BS of: "We told our lawyers to tell us it was legal, and so it was." Will the Bush administration EVER answer for their crimes? I think not at this point.
EFF updates their commentary (Score:4, Informative)
Since I wrote the summary, the EFF has a new page up with some analysis and commentary. [eff.org]
that last bit is referring to some of John Yoo's embarrassingly shoddy 'legal' work, which (now 9th Circuit Judge-for-life) Jay Bybee signed off on.
My heart bleeds (Score:5, Insightful)
The NSA tapping American phones? I would feel really bad about that, if I did not just recall that I'm European and that the NSA requires no warrant or reason to invade my privacy. It was expressly created for that. Do not expect me to feel sympathy when a Chinese agency snoops on your communications. You never gave it a thought whether indiscriminate spying on 'them danged furriners', i.e. me, was ethically justified.
Parts of the report read like a novel (Score:2)
Imagine you are a staff attorney being asked to sign off on the legality of a secret government program. You read the legal analysis, written earlier by your successor, and realize that not only are parts of the analysis legally flawed, but some the facts aren't even right. Not only does the analysis set aside an entire act of Congress, it fails to describe accurately the program itself.
In its current state, there's no way you could sign off. Problem is, the President of the United States has already bee
illegal? (Score:2)
Not backing up the NSA in any way but WAS it in fact judged illegal by a court? I thought the matter was still to be decided by the judicial system?
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The whole thing dodges everything from 2001-2005. All they do is put it on Mr. Yoo. It's very light on details to a good point un until 05-07. Surprise = 0. The whole thing is a giant circljerk/clusterfuck about whose fault it is.
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It does kinda seem like the people running the show picked the fall guy in advance. Emptywheel's thread does point out one interesting detail - After Comey refused to sign off, George W. Bush personally called Ashcroft at the hospital, to try to hide what was going on just one more time.
The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.
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The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.
Bush didn't see himself as breaking any laws. The way he saw it, as "War President" he wasn't bound by any laws. The ass-covering part was merely an attempt to avoid the hassle of having to explain that to a bunch of naive liberal lawyers who foolishly believed what they were told in civics class.
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Bush didn't see himself as breaking any laws.
the fact that he was wrong doesn't make his conduct lawful. Ignorance of the law is no defense.
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And the Crusades were (if not started, at least kept alive) by people legitimately believing they were doing God's work by liberating the Holy City from heathens.
That's the scary part of life, villians aren't the handle-bar mustache twirling evil-doers that we see on TV. They, for the most part, aren't acting out of pure self interest and a desire simply to cause misery. Most 'villians' are people who quite clearly seem themselves in the role of the Hero (with the capital H required) in the story, doing wha
Re:Seems like nothing now... (Score:4, Informative)
It's worse than that. Bish got rid of Habeas Corpus after 800 years. Obama now reserves the Executive Privilege to detain indefinitely, those acquitted and exonerated!
Obama claims right to imprison "combatants" acquitted at trial
By Bill Van Auken
10 July 2009
In testimony before the US Senate Tuesday, legal representatives of the Obama administration not only defended the system of kangaroo military tribunals set up under Bush, but affirmed the government's right to continue imprisoning detainees indefinitely, even if they are tried and acquitted on allegations of terror-related crimes.
This assertion of sweeping, extra-constitutional powers is only the latest in a long series of decisions by the Democratic administration demonstrating its essential continuity with the Bush White House on questions of militarism and attacks on democratic rights.
The testimony, given to the Senate Armed Services Committee by the top lawyer for the Pentagon and the head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, came in the context of a congressional bid to reconfigure the military tribunal system set up under the Bush administration.
In 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in an attempt to lend legal cover to the system of drumhead courts set up to try so-called "enemy combatants," which had been found unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. The high court subsequently ruled against the congressionally revised system as well.
This latest effort, like the one carried out three years ago, is aimed at fending off successful court challenges to the system. The Senate Armed Services Committee introduced new military commission legislation last month as part of the 2010 military spending bill.
As the committee's Democratic chairman, Carl Levin of Michigan, put it, the aim was to "substitute new procedures and language" that would "restore confidence in military commissions."
As the administration's lawyers made clear, however, any changes will amount to mere window dressing in an Orwellian system where the government decides who is entitled to trial, whether defendants are brought before military or civilian courts, and even whether or not to free those who are found not guilty.
The Justice Department attorney, David Kris, told the Senate panel that civilian and military prosecutors are still debating whether scores of detainees who have been marked for trial will be brought before a military tribunal or a civilian court.
"This is a fact-intensive judgment that requires a careful assessment of all the evidence," Kris said. He acknowledged that some form of trial was preferable to simply continuing to hold the detainees as "unlawful combatants."
What is clear, however, is that this "fact intensive" process is aimed at determining which detainees can be convicted in a civilian court, which of them must be sent to military tribunals because of the weakness of the evidence against them, and which will simply be held without trial because there is no evidence that would stand up in either venue. In such a system, all must be found guilty--the only question is by what means.
Undoubtedly another major concern is keeping out of open court cases which could make public the heinous crimes carried out by the US military and intelligence apparatus in the "war on terror," including acts of "extraordinary rendition," torture and murder.
The Obama White House has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to cover up these crimes, including by defying a court order to release Pentagon torture photos and the Justice Department's attempts to quash legal challenges to the criminal practices of the Bush administration, including rendition, torture and illegal domestic spying.
Appearing with Kris was Jeh Johnson, the chief lawyer of the Defense Department, who made the case for the president's supposed power to continue holding detainees without bringing them before any court and to throw men acquitted back into prison without new charges or trials.
"There will be at the end of this review a category of people that we in the administration believe must be retained for reasons of public safety and national security," Johnson said. "And they're not necessarily people that we'll prosecute."
He continued: "The question of what happens if there's an acquittal is an interesting question--we talk about that often within the administration. If, for some reason, he's not convicted for a lengthy prison sentence, then, as a matter of legal authority, I think it's our view that we would have the ability to detain that person."
Johnson indicated that such extraordinary powers--which continue the Bush administration's repudiation of habeas corpus, the bedrock right to challenge unlawful imprisonment--stemmed from the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. This is the same all-purpose legal pretext used by the Bush administration to justify unconstitutional measures.
One member of Congress accurately described as "show trials" a system in which prosecutions are carried out in civilian or military courts based on where they are assured convictions, and, in the unlikely event that a defendant manages to escape conviction, he can be sent back to jail anyway.
"What bothers me is that they seem to be saying, 'Some people we have good enough evidence against, so we'll give them a fair trial,'" Representative Jerrold Nadler (Democrat of New York) told the Wall Street Journal. He continued: "Some people the evidence is not so good, so we'll give them a less fair trial. We'll give them just enough due process to ensure a conviction because we know they're guilty. That's not a fair trial, that's a show trial." Nadler chairs a House Judiciary subcommittee which held a hearing Wednesday on military commissions.
In his testimony, Kris of the Justice Department acknowledged that there are "serious questions" about whether charges of "material support for terrorism" can be brought before a military tribunal, which, according to Obama, will exist solely to prosecute violations of the laws of war.
But Kris made it clear that the administration's lawyers had determined that the "material support" charge could be brought before military commissions, and, in most cases, lumped together with conspiracy charges that would help convictions stand up on appeal.
The point was a significant one, as the great majority of those held at the US Navy prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--as well as the thousands more who have been thrown into military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as CIA "black sites" around the world--have not been accused of any specific terrorist act. Rather, with little or no evidence, they are charged with support for or association with terrorists.
"Material support for terrorism" has also been the principal charge figuring in a succession of frame-up trials in the US itself, where dozens of individuals have been ensnared by government agent provocateurs in FBI "terror plot" sting operations.
The Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers claimed that both the administration and the Senate panel were on the same page in barring the use of confessions extracted under torture to convict those brought before military tribunals. However, differences emerged between the Justice Department lawyer Kris and a top uniformed legal official who also testified.
While Kris warned that the use of "involuntary" confessions could lead to convictions being overturned on appeal, Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald, the navy's judge advocate general, argued that a military judge should be able to evaluate the "reliability" of "coerced statements" in deciding whether they can be introduced as evidence.
The administration's lawyers also backed the provision in the legislation passed by the Senate panel that allows the use of hearsay evidence, which would be excluded from a civilian court. As Kris put it, the use of such evidence is necessary "given the unique circumstances of military and intelligence operations."
The testimony of the Pentagon lawyer, Jeh Johnson, also further called into question Obama's pledge to close down the Guantanamo prison by January 22, 2010. He allowed that many of the cases would not be ready by next January and declined to state where the military tribunals would be held, saying the administration was considering "various options." Earlier this year, Congress blocked funding for transferring detainees to the US.
Testifying before a House panel Wednesday, a former Guantanamo prosecutor delivered a scathing indictment of the military tribunal system, including in the revamped form proposed by the Obama administration.
Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, appearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee, said that he was the seventh Guantanamo military prosecutor to resign because he could not "ethically or legally prosecute the defendant within the military commission system."
The Senate legislation, he charged, left in place a system that is "illegal and unconstitutional," serving to "undermine the fundamental values of justice and liberty."
Describing himself as having gone to Guantanamo as a "true believer," Vandeveld said his view was radically changed by the case of the young Afghan he was assigned to prosecute, Mohammed Jawad.
He described the basic elements of the case brought against Jawad, who may have been as young as 12 when captured by US troops in Afghanistan: "a confession obtained through torture, two suicide attempts by the accused, abusive interrogations, the withholding of exculpatory evidence from the defense, judicial incompetence, and ugly attempts to cover up the failures of an irretrievably broken system."
The Obama administration continues to hold the youth, who has faced imprisonment, torture and abuse for nearly seven years, on the basis of the confession extracted under torture.
What becomes increasingly evident is that the current administration is maintaining and expanding the police-state infrastructure created by its predecessor, with the phony claims of revived "due process" serving only to give this extra-legal system a veneer of legitimacy.
This system will not only affect the 229 detainees held at Guantanamo--though this is no small question, given that innocent men have been imprisoned and tortured there for seven years. It will be in place to deal with future detainees abducted by the US military and the CIA around the world, as well as anyone whom the president of the United States--whether Obama or his successors--deems a threat to national security, including American citizens.
Should such an "enemy combatant" prove his innocence in court, no matter! The all-powerful president can simply ignore the verdict and continue imprisoning him anyway. This is a textbook definition of dictatorship.
Re:Seems like nothing now... (Score:5, Informative)
Um.. Not 800 years. Lincoln got rid of it for a lot more people just 140 years ago. Almost the entire south was without it at one point in time.
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It's worse than that. Bish got rid of Habeas Corpus after 800 years. Obama now reserves the Executive Privilege to detain indefinitely, those acquitted and exonerated!
Um.. Not 800 years. Lincoln got rid of it for a lot more people just 140 years ago. Almost the entire south was without it at one point in time.
Just because it was done in the past doesn't make it ok.
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I didn't say it was ok, I said it wasn't 800 years.
And the reason it is in the constitution is because England suspended habeas corpus on the colonies in several instances and the founders saw that it might be necessary at some time, they wanted to limit that time to when it was absolutely necessary. So even if we remove the 140 years ago with Lincoln, we has 250 years ago with king George.
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So much for change. I have the feeling these detainees will just be held until Obama is out of office, where it's 4 or 8 years. Just pass the problem on. I think for once my mom is correct, the country really is starting to go to hell.
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...but the pace is accelerating.
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Madison Avenue.
Re:Seems like nothing now... (Score:5, Insightful)
confiscating the retirement savings of GM bond holders and giving it to the UAW
There were no savings of GM bond holders. GM went bankrupt, and its liabilities far outweighed any conceivable future profits. The bonds were already worthless, and the retirement savings were already lost.
The government may have wrongly given a bunch of taxpayer bailout money to the UAW, but that still doesn't mean that GM bond holders deserved any of the taxpayers' money either.
taking over the banking sector
Likewise, the entire banking sector was insolvent. Flat B-R-O-K-E. Either the US government, the Chinese government, or Middle Eastern investors were going to end up owning all of the pieces of that entire industry. The American people opted for the US government.
planning to ration health care.
Heads up: your health care is *already* rationed, by your PHB.
Re:Seems like nothing now... (Score:4, Informative)
There was NO MONEY for the bond holders *or* the UAW to have "preference" over. The UAW got new money from the taxpayers. That's a different issue, but the bondholders didn't have a valid claim on this new money either.
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There was NO MONEY for the bond holders *or* the UAW to have "preference" over.
What are you talking about? GM had plenty of assets. In a bankruptcy, the guys who hold GM debt (bondholders) should be able to decide to sell all the assets to pay off as much of the debt as they can.
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Yeah, hey had assets, the value of which I summed up here [slashdot.org]. The insignificant residual value of GM's foreclosed assets to bondholders was a tiny fraction of its psychological value to this country.
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BOND HOLDERS should be the new owners of GM.
Technically true. However, BOND HOLDERS would have gotten something like 1 cent on the dollar in a liquidation sale of GM's office supplies, trademarks and machine tools to obscure Chinese industrial conglomerates. However, the total humiliation that the United States of America would have experienced in such a fire sale would have in the long run damaged our country far worse than these bond defaults. We'd have to erase "Apple pie and Chevrolet" from our vocabulary.
Anyway, BOND HOLDERS could have listened