Lawyers made opening statements Tuesday as the trial began in earnest for the first former Guantanamo detainee transferred to U.S. soil. While the government portrayed the slight, baby-faced 36-year-old as a vicious al Qaeda murderer who helped plan two US embassy bombings that killed 224 people, the defense told a very different story. Although not contesting much of the evidence the government plans to present --- about the bombings themselves, its destructiveness and their innocent victims -- defense lawyers argue that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was a hapless young Tanzanian duped into helping his powerful childhood friends who, unbeknownst to him, were al Qaeda killers.
What's most surprising about the case is that, based on the government's opening arguments, it's not clear whether prosecutors have any direct evidence establishing that Ghailani intended to hurt anyone, or even knew that the items he purchased in Tanzania were going to be used as a bomb. That knowledge is a critical element of the charges against him -- particularly the multiple murder charges.
Whispers whirled around the White House, on The Hill, within the Department of Justice, and finally filtered down to the streets. In truth, talk could be heard on the avenues, where average Americans roam, long before declarations came from above. Should BP CEO Tony Hayward Go to Prison? The public wonders. What would the Obama Administration do. Countless clamored; with full knowledge that President Bush's DOJ Killed a Criminal Probe Into BP. It was believed that the potential indictments threatened the most senior officials. More recently, words of warrants have become a distinct possibility. Criminal charges are being considered against BP in regards to the Gulf oil rig tragedy.
(This is virtually the same sort of Bush-Administration type of move by the Obama DOJ I described yesterday with respect to undermining progress on the greeenhouse gas front. Again, this is a situation in which there is NO GOP obstructionism that one can point your finger at. This all a matter of internal Obama Administration decisionmaking. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
A two-year battle in the courts concluded this week when the Department of Justice approved Georgia's controversial voter verification system that was originally struck down in 2009 as inaccurate, unreliable, and worst of all, discriminatory against people of color and naturalized citizens. The decision leaves voting rights advocates dismayed as to why the DOJ would allow the state to implement this arguably overzealous and potentially disenfranchising procedure.
Today's report that the CIA possesses videotapes of interrogations of alleged 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh in a secret prison in Morocco is renewing attention to the government's abusive interrogations practiced in secret prisons around the world as part of its "war on terror." But U.S. officials are already saying that the tapes, which have not been publicly released, don't actually show any abuse.
"The tapes record a guy sitting in a room just answering questions," a U.S. official told the Associated Press, which broke the story.
That may be true. But even if the two videos and one audiotape of Bin al shibh's interrogation in Morocco show largely benign interrogations, that shouldn't distract attention from the fact that we know that many of the videotapes that the CIA did successfully destroy in 2005 documented serious abuse. Those destroyed tapes include 92 interrogation videos of two other alleged al Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, both of whom were subjected by CIA operatives to a form of torture known as waterboarding - a controlled drowning intended as a death threat. Abu Zubaydah, we know from Justice Department memos and the diligent blogger Marcy Wheeler, was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 alone.
And as Wheeler aptly points out today, we don't know what parts of those interrogations were not videotaped in that Moroccan prison, or elsewhere. (The AP has a helpful timeline of BinalShibh's custody in various CIA "black sites" here.) The former British captive Binyam Mohamed, Wheeler notes, has claimed that he was brutally tortured for months in that same Moroccan prison around the same time.
The latest set of tapes was accidentally discovered in 2007, tucked under a desk in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, the AP reported today. The U.S. government twice told a federal judge that they did not exist.
Justice Department prosecutor John Durham is already investigating whether destroying the Zubaydah and al-Nashiri tapes was illegal. He's now also probing why the Binalshibh interrogation tapes were never disclosed. Durham is also tasked with a preliminary investigation into whether CIA interrogators broke the law by torturing, threatening and otherwise abusing terror suspects under their control. He has yet to release any of his findings.
Senate Bill 1070, Arizona's notorious anti-immigrant law, is set to go into effect on July 29. With days left to go, Organizers are in a race against the clock to minimize the bill's impact on immigrant communities. Meanwhile, legal experts are examining the strategy behind a federal Department of Justice suit recently lobbed against the Arizona law, and other immigrant rights supporters continue to pressure the state via boycott. All of these acts are contributing to a tumultuous fight that's escalating by the day.
Modernizing voter registration services has been a big theme in policy and government circles since the 2008 presidential election. But a new effort by the Department of Justice to better implement a 20th century voting rights law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA)-known as the motor voter bill-could make equally big waves, potentially adding millions of voters to official lists.
Hope for a comprehensive immigration reform bill this year has fallen by the wayside, but the Obama administration israllying for one last hurrah before mid-term elections in November. Late last week, the White House unofficially announced plans to sue the state of Arizona over the now notorious Senate Bill 1070, a state law passed this year to crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
There is an art in politics to not over-reaching and not over-reacting. But the latest salvo by one of the best-known conservative voting rights activists at his former workplace-the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which enforces federal voting rights law-crosses a new line: urging states to ignore the DOJ on voting rights.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) likes to tout his experience as a former military lawyer. Graham apparently thinks this makes him sound more convincing when he goes around advocating military trials for all suspected terrorists, as he's been doing lately. Graham's now trying to get that idea signed into law in a bill he's introduced in the Senate. A similar provision is likely headed to a vote today in the House of Representatives.
On the last day of 2009, federal district court judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed homicide charges against five former Blackwater security guards involved in a shooting that killed fourteen Iraqi civilians in 2007. Judge Urbina's decision cites egregious prosecutorial misconduct by the federal prosecutors handling the case as the reason for the dismissal. The dismissal comes at the end of a year that saw at least a dozen cases of federal prosecutorial misconduct, including the well known Ted Stevens fiasco. These cases and others reinforce an emerging consensus that we must do more to ensure that our prosecutors live up to the standards of professionalism and fairness on which our system depends.
In reporting on the long-delayed release of the Justice Department's ethics report on the work of Bush administration lawyers who approved the torture of detainees, The New York Times on Saturday wrote that it "brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture."
A New York Times story this week reported that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is planning to return the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to its historical mission: protecting the civil rights of Americans. According to the article, the new attorney general is committed to "a revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies...where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly," including housing, employment, lending practices, and voting rights.
One of the most troubling trends that foster prosecutorial misconduct is the failure of state bar and disciplinary agencies to take action against prosecutors who violate their ethical obligations.
Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice (DOJ) took swift and almost unprecedented action after uncovering egregious prosecutorial misconduct in the case against Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Holder promptly dismissed all charges against the Senator, and federal judge Emmet Sullivan ordered an independent, criminal investigation of the prosecutors responsible for intentionally failing to turn over important, exculpatory evidence to the defense. The DOJ has also promised an investigation through the Office of Professional Responsibility. The question now is whether these particular prosecutors will ever be held accountable.
I have a friend who just moved to Wisconsin. I told her she is so lucky -- despite the snow, despite the cold, despite the relatively sparse population where they are now living, despite the cabin fever in the winter -- she is so lucky, because she has Russ Feingold as her Senator. She agreed.
How few politicians we have on a national level who are as consistently principled as Russ Feingold. So committed to fairness, justice. And truth. Principles before personalities. He has not caved to the charm of the ever-charming President Obama. He is taking that rare step, at least among the current crop of corrupt politicians in Congress, of continuing to pursue the principle, continuing to question, continuing to demand the Constitution be respected and the law be enforced.
What a shame that President Obama selected Eric Holder to be Attorney General. I don't know much about him, but what I hear just keeps getting worse. The DOJ is seemingly on the wrong side of every issue. Starting with their refusal to prosecute anyone, or conduct investigations, relating to war crimes, torture, murder by the Bush-Cheney administration, and refusal to investigate and prosecute the criminals on Wall Street who have looted and plundered our country. What Justice?
How fitting then that the esteemed Senator Feingold and the lackluster Attorney General Holder should come face to face last week on television, for the whole nation to see. My, Eric, you come across looking just like -- a BushMan! Arrogant, condescending, evasive, dishonest, sleazy. Contemptuous.
Does this AG believe, just like all the string of sleazy AGs from the Bush crowd believed, that they are above the law, that the president can do what he wants and the AG reports only to him, the law and the constitution be damned? This guy Holder looks like a BB shot into a steel barrel full of vegetable oil: he jumps, he bolts, he skids, he slides, he evades, he's back and forth and up and down, he's sleazy. And he refuses to answer the simple question, for which a simple answer is readily available. It could have been Cheney sitting there answering the question.
Question: You agree, don't you, that the warrantless wiretaps used by the Bush administration were illegal?
Answer: Well, it depends on what the meaning of "used" is, or what you mean by Bush, or whether you mean "used" like some think of that word, or in some other fashion. I mean it just depends. It's hard to say. It's confusing. Illegal? Is that what you asked? Well, who can say? I mean illegal -- that's a pretty big word, isn't it? Whose law? Your law? Somebody else's law? What law? Does it really matter, anyway? Can't we just look forward, not spend our time looking backwards. Can't we all just get along. Illegal? Is that the question? Well, I'm sure some might say it was unwise, or perhaps unknown, or uncertain, or undercover, or underling. But illegal?
What a sleazy con man this guy Holder appears to be.
Yes Eric, that was the question: do you agree the wiretaps were illegal? Because if you do, then why haven't you done anything to prosecute the Bush-Cheney people who have violated our rights? When should we expect your indictment to be filed, and who do you anticipate naming as a defendant. How about answering those questions, or are these simple constitutional issues just way beyond your legal understanding, as the chief law enforcement officer of the land? Remember the 4th Amendment? No warrant no wiretap. Remember that one?
Do you agree with Bush-Cheney that the Constitution is toilet paper, and you as the AG exist mostly to cover up and avoid and deceive and allow the wealthy and powerful to break the law and get away with it? That's my own personal expanded version of the question. I'm not nearly as polite as Senator Feingold.
Oh yeah: here's the answer. YES. YES THE WIRETAPS WERE ILLEGAL. YES THEY WERE A VIOLATION OF LAWS -- LOTS OF LAWS AND A VIOLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION. THAT'S THE ANSWER. NOW DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. ENFORCE THE LAW. INDICT THE CRIMINALS. DO YOUR JOB.
A currently challenged provision of the Voting Rights Act requires several states with a history of discriminatory election practices to seek federal approval before changing election rules. Under this provision, the Department of Justice this week rejected a Georgia voter list maintenance procedure that it deemed both discriminatory and inaccurate, according to the Associated Press.
STATE BLOGS
