Discourse.net

Gas Prices Are Getting Out of Hand

Source: BBC

Catholic Bishops Get Political

Two thoughtful, very very different, sets of thoughts inspired by the recent decision of certain Catholic Bishops to instruct their parishoners how to vote:

• Mirror of Justice, Bishops, Politics, and Excommunication
• TaxProf Blog, Will Catholic Church’s Criticism of Kerry Jeopardize Tax Exemption?

Western Civilization, RIP

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog, pens an obituary for Western Civilization:

Western Civilization. Born 3500 B.C. in early Mesopotamian city-states, Western Civilization developed numerous complex systems of political governance, conquered most of the inhabited world, and invented the hot air balloon, the nuclear bomb, and the ice cream cone. Died May 17, 2004, of a gay agenda in a Massachusetts court house. It is survived by isolated anarchist survivalist camps and nomadic bands of flesh-eating zombies.

OK, That's A Denial

I complained yesterday that the Pentagon issued a non-denial denial about the New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh. Today we get a full-bodied denial: Pentagon: Hersh report ‘journalist malpractice’.

Update: To ice the cake, the DoD changed the original press release.

All About the WMD Commission

Here’s a useful service, provided by WashingtonPost.com (Dan Froomkin dept.): All About the WMD Commission.

Eric Muller Is Asking the Right Questions About the Justice Dept.

In More on the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and the Supreme Court, Eric Muller is asking the right questions about whether the Justice Dept. misled the Supreme Court, either on purpose or (more likely) due to incompetence or manipulation.

Two months ago I would have been confident that of course no one in the SG’s office would knowingly lie to the Supreme Court. I still think that’s more likely than not. But when your government will torture people, everything has to be on the table.

Another Internet Identity Mystery Story

Just another Internet identity mystery story? But this is an unusually good one: The Search for Isabella V. Here’s “her” blog, she’s a flight risk.

Weird Gitmo Abuse Claims Seem More Credible Now (Alas!)

Back in a more innocent age — that would be about two months ago — I wrote a post (UK’s Released Detainees Allege Torture) quoting but doubting claims of bizzare forms of abuse reported by recently releasted Gitmo detainees. I said then:

I do not believe the US would starve detainees or feed them spoiled food. Would it? And the stuff the Mirror repeats about the use of prostitutes to shock sensitive Muslims with naked bodies and menstral blood sounds just too weird — more like the propaganda of a person who has been held illegally in hard conditions for two years and wants his revenge.

My conclusion then was that,

Outside independent review — ideally judicial review — is essential either to rebut these claims convincingly or to root out and punish those responsbile if the uglier charges are at all true.

Have to say that those charges seem less impossible today. And I’m still not exactly clear on who’s going to be doing that independent review…

Torture Not A Policy, Just a Pattern. Right.

The Observer reports that US guards ‘filmed beatings’ at terror camp:

Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed.

Denial or Non-Denial Denial?

The press, and most blogs, are playing this DoD News: Statement from DoD Spokesperson Mr. Lawrence Di Rita as a categorical denial of the latest Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker.

That’s odd, because at least to a lawyer’s eye it seems awfully cagey. Let’s parse all five paragraphs of it to see if it’s a real denial, or just a non-denial denial.

Update (5/17/04): DoD changed the original press release if you follow the link it will have additional text now. Plus they issued another denial

Rumsfeld Ordered 'Physical Coercion and Sexual Humiliation of Iraqi Prisoners'

Here’s William Safire defending Donald Rumsfeld last week as the Cabinet member soooo concerned with civil rights:

Shortly after 9/11, with the nation gripped by fear and fury, the Bush White House issued a sweeping and popular order to crack down on suspected terrorists. The liberal establishment largely fell cravenly mute. A few lonely civil libertarians spoke out. When I used the word “dictatorial,” conservatives, both neo- and paleo-, derided my condemnation as “hysterical.”

One Bush cabinet member paid attention. Rumsfeld appointed a bipartisan panel of attorneys to re-examine that draconian edict. As a result, basic protections for the accused Qaeda combatants were included in the proposed military tribunals.

Perhaps because of those protections, the tribunals never got off the ground. (The Supreme Court will soon, I hope, provide similar legal rights to suspected terrorists who are U.S. citizens.) But in the panic of the winter of 2001, Rumsfeld was one of the few in power concerned about prisoners’ rights.

It smelled like fiction back then, since I recalled that the Pentagon had written rules for Gitmo trials that were so harsh that even administration lawyers rebelled against the first draft. Now here’s Seymore Hersch in the New Yorker, with a different set of facts about how Rumsfeld is soooo sensitive to prisoner rights:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.”

1. Who you gonna believe?

2. Looks like that search for the persons responsible that Rumsfeld promised us may not take too long.

3. When did Bush first learn of this order?

3A. If Bush knew in advance, is that why he said Rumsfeld is the best Secretary of Defense ever? (Version (i) Bush knew in advance and supported Rumsfeld in order to ensure Rumsfeld’s silence; version (ii) Bush knew in advance, agreed with the policy and still does, and that’s why he thinks Rumsfeld is so great.)

3B. If Bush didn’t know of this order at all when he ranked Rumsfeld above George Marshall, would he like a mulligan?

4. Was Safire lying on purpose, tactically, the way he usually does, or did his friend play him for a patsy?

Full Text of Red Cross Report at Cryptome

Cryptome (in the heroic rather than creepy mode) has the full text of Red Cross Report on Iraq POWs, or to give it its full title, “Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation.”

The Berg Detention: Legal Issues

Nicholas Berg’s family says that he was in US custody for all or part of the period before his release, a release followed almost immediately by his capture by Al Qaeda or someone equally vicious. The US government’s denial of this claim is one of the weirdest I’ve ever heard. The US admits:

• “the FBI asked the police to keep Berg in custody while its agents reviewed the case”
• FBI agents met with him repeatedly while he was in custody
• Berg was freed the day after his parents filed suit claiming he was being held by the US

All together, this hardly paints a picture of US authorities with their hands off. Nevertheless, the US maintains that the Iraqi police were the ones responsible for Berg’s detention. But here’s the missing element: why is that relevant?

The United States plans to ‘return’ sovereignty to Iraq on June 30 (although whether this legal action will include any real power is obviously a hotly debated topic in DC right now). It follows that Iraq is not currently sovereign; that sovereignty is being exercised by the occupiers, who might be described as “a coalition of forces” or as “the United States”.

Currently the Iraqi police are an agent of the sovereign power in Iraq. And that’s the US (or the ‘Coalition’ of which the US is the driving force). So either way the US is ultimately responsible, isn’t it?

The Disconnect

On my flight home from Boston yesterday, I sat next to a pleasant young couple. He’s the entrepreneurial son of a family that runs a restaurant and has other businesses. She’s going to business school part time and running his family’s ice cream shop. They were going to Miami for a week’s vacation.

As I dozed off — I’ve gotten very good at sleeping on planes — I heard the pleasant young lady explaining to her partner that she couldn’t vote for Kerry because he would surrender to the terrorists. Later in the flight, the nice young man explained to me that he thought people were making too much of the pictures of prisoner abuse, since the people over there are basically animals.

It shakes your faith in the basic decency of people, it does.

Here, meanwhile, is an account of the great GW Bush’s efforts to help us be safe and secure in the War on Terror™ — so great that everyone put in charge quits in disgust within a few months. One writes a book, another goes to work for the Kerry campaign:

The New Republic Online: Campaign Journal: A couple of Friday afternoons ago, the White House quietly announced that an NSC staffer named Frances Fragos Townsend was leaving her post as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism, the job also known as the White House counterterrorism czar. She is leaving to replace General John A. Gordon as Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor, the White House job that Tom Ridge had before the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Why would this staff change qualify for a late Friday dump? Two reasons. One is that Gordon, a retired Air Force general and 36-year public servant, was apparently none too pleased with the Bush approach to homeland security. He hasn’t spoken publicly, but that’s what the national security grapevine in Washington is buzzing about.

Secondly, Townsend’s move was a reminder that the White House counterterrorism job is the bureaucratic equivalent of the drummer in Spinal Tap. Bush has now gone through five of them since 9/11. (Clinton had one.) Like Spinal Tap’s drummers, who often choked on their own vomit or spontaneously combusted, Bush’s counterterrorism aides all seem to disappear under unusual circumstances.

First there was Richard Clarke. We all know what happened to him. He left his post in disgust and wrote a book arguing that Bush paid no attention to terrorism before 9/11 and that the war in Iraq was a monumental diversion from the fight against al Qaeda and a gift to jihadist recruiters across the Muslim world. Clarke was replaced by General Wayne Downing, a pro-Iraq war hawk. Nonetheless, he had a similar experience, lasting a total of 10 months before abruptly resigning in frustration at how the White House bureaucracy was responding to the terrorist threat. Downing was replaced by two men, General Gordon, who lasted ten months before moving on to his homeland security job, and Rand Beers, who resigned in disgust over the Iraq war after seven months in his post. His experience was searing enough that he immediately joined the Kerry campaign. Beers was replaced by Townsend, who has now been tapped to replace Gordon, who is apparently resigning under circumstances similar to Clarke and Beers.

(spotted via Dan, who also points to this)

Florida Vouchers: 'A Disaster Waiting to Happen'

FlaBlog brings me this happy reminder about “Jeb Bush’s and the Dept. of Education’s refusal to enforce minimal standards for receiving state school voucher money. A draft proposal calls for voluntary rules and if you don’t comply, no biggie, you still get state money.”

The voucher program has already had a series of scandals where people started “schools” that only existed on paper, so this is especially evil.

Memo Reveals Flaws in South Flordia's New Voting Machines

Oh boy are we in trouble.

Count Crisis? Elections official warns of glitches that may scramble vote auditing. See also Ed Felton’s summary of the key points. I’m pleased to report that UM Law’s own Marnie Mahoney is deeply involved in the effort to try to solve the problem with the iVotronic machines. But from the sound of the news stories, local officials are working hard to pretend there’s no problem.

Idea Shop: Law & Econ With Pizzaz

A proof by example that economics need not always be the dismal science: The Idea Shop.

ID Standards: the Trans-National Dimension

Here’s the 2-page outline of the talk I gave today at the seminar on ID cards and human rights.

Ugly Things Grow In Dark Corners

Secret prisons. Harsh interrogations. Heard this one before?

Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations: The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as “water boarding,” in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

How many detention faciilities does the CIA run? How many prisoners? How long are they held? Are they released?

And those are the easy questions. The tough ones are about how often the CIA launders its torture through foreign intelligence agencies.