The New York Times today highlights a new report released by ProPublica and the National Law Journal concluding that torture and "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved by the Bush Administration and used on suspected terrorists has made it impossible to bring many of those alleged terrorists to justice.
Of the 53 habeas corpus cases brought by Guantanamo detainees and decided by federal court judges, the government has lost 37. Many of those losses were because the only evidence against the detainee was a coerced confession or statements from other prisoners who'd been tortured. Federal court judges have rightly found such statements unreliable and inadmissible. The result is that many of those suspects have won orders of release. (Only three have actually been freed.)
Unfortunately, those orders have led some critics of the administration - including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Brookings Institution commentator Benjamin Wittes - to argue that we need more expansive detention laws so the government doesn't have to let those suspects go. That's precisely the wrong response in a society that claims to presume suspects are innocent until actually proven guilty. (The standard in habeas cases is actually much lower than in a criminal case; the government only has to prove that it's "more likely than not" that the suspect can legally be detained.) Those 37 prisoners won their habeas cases because the government had no reliable evidence that they'd been fighting for al Qaeda or the Taliban. So judges across the political spectrum concluded that the government hadn't demonstrated that these detainees are detainable under the laws of war.
In a report Human Rights First released with The Constitution Project in June, 16 former federal judges explained that the courts deciding these habeas cases are doing the right thing: they're weighing the evidence, deciding the facts and applying the law. No new laws are needed. On the contrary, a new detention law designed to help the government win more cases in the absence of reliable evidence would only tarnish the reputation of the U.S. justice system, which in these cases is doing itself proud.
As the Times points out, these court decisions demonstrate a "respect for due process [that] will help repair this country's battered reputation." The Bush administration's failure to apply basic, longstanding American justice standards is what landed us in this mess in the first place, requiring that some terror suspects go free. Creating a new legal standard to accommodate those past mistakes would only compound the problem and drive the United States' reputation further into the ground.
We're already seeing that happen at the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Although, as Peter Finn in the Washington Post today points out, many of the military commission cases have stalled, one that has gone forward recently produced a highly questionable ruling that was immediately broadcast around the world.
In the case of a Canadian citizen and alleged child soldier, Omar Khadr, the judge ruled that a threat of gang-rape and murder in prison from his lead interrogator did not taint any of the 15-year-old's later "confessions" that he threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. Given that there's no physical evidence that Khadr committed the act, his statements to interrogators at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantanamo Bay are critical to the prosecution.
In a similar case, brought against Mohammed Jawad, also accused of throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers as a child, the military commission judge in 2008 concluded that early threats by Afghan interrogators tainted all of Jawad's later statements made to the Americans. His case was ultimately thrown out and he was returned to Afghanistan.
These sorts of conflicting rulings can happen in the military commissions, an ad hoc justice system created in fits and starts over the last eight years with no binding precedent or road-tested rules. It's one reason why those military commissions lack the legitimacy of civilian federal courts.
Like the court rulings ordering Guantanamo detainees freed, the military commissions, too, are a legacy of torture. They're an attempt to patch together a quasi-justice system to accommodate, without acknowledging or rectifying, the egregious mistakes of the past.
But neither new detention rules nor military commissions can truly overcome torture's legacy. That can only be done by admitting what happened, holding perpetrators accountable, and ultimately, prosecuting terror suspects in our time-tested, world-renowned American justice system. And that is rightly something about which this country can be proud.
Last Thurday, in Salon's War Room, Michael Barthel tried to explain "Why we ignored two huge stories"--the Washington Post "secret government" story about the vast expansion of the intelligence sector--particularly the private intelligence sector--since 9/11, and the Wikileaks Afghanistan War logs. "In the last two weeks, two major newspapers reported two major stories, but Americans mostly yawned," the sub-head read. But his reasons are mostly unvincing, and the subhead indicates why: it's not so much that the American people yawned, it's that most of the rest of the media did.
Barthel gives four explanations, which we'll examine more closely in minute:
They lacked a simple, relatively novel takeaway point....
They did not have a direct, obvious impact on readers....
They lacked compelling visuals....
They didn't play into current political narratives....
Note that the first and last reasons are somewhat in tension, if not contradiction with one another: the first speaks of novelty, the last of familiarity. But before exploring further, consider how Salon's own Glenn Greenwald decribed the neglect of the first story the Friday before:
Remember how The Washington Postspent three days documenting on its front page that we basically live under a vast Secret Government -- composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations -- so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does? This public/private Secret Government spies, detains, interrogates, and even wages wars in the dark, while sucking up untold hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the private corporations which run it. Has any investigative series ever caused less of a ripple than this one? After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana Priest and William Arkin -- most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised along with whether the Post had Endangered the Nation by writing about all of this -- the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again, easily subsumed by the Andrew Breitbart and Journolist sagas.
Any doubt about whether there'd be any meaningful (or even cosmetic) changes as a result of the Post exposé (it was really more a compilation of already known facts) was quickly dispelled by the reaction of the political class: not just one of indifference, but outright contempt for the concerns raised by this story. On Tuesday -- 24 hours after the first installment appeared -- the Senate's Homeland Security Intelligence Committee removed a provision from the Intelligence Authorization Act which would have provided some marginally greater oversight over the Government's secret intelligence programs, because Obama was threatening to veto any bill providing for such oversight. Then, Obama's nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, Ret. Lt. Gen. James Clapper, all but laughed at the Post's work, dismissing it during his Senate confirmation hearing as "sensationalism," praising the bureaucratic redundancies as "competitive analysis," and insisting that the National Security and Surveillance State are perfectly "under control." The Post's Jeff Stein today documents how Congressional Democrats can barely rouse themselves to the pretense that they intend to do anything to impose any restraints or accountability on Top Secret America. And it was revealed this week by McClatchy that our vaunted "withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq" will be accomplished only by assembling a privatized militia that will serve as the State Department's "army in Iraq" long after our actual army "withdraws."
Political elites don't even feel compelled to pretend to be able or willing to do anything about this. Just think about this: on Monday, the Post documents a vast Secret Government bequeathed with unimaginable secrecy and unaccountability, and the rest of the week is filled with stories of the administration's blocking greater oversight and plans to escalate the privitization of our National Security and Surveillance State. That's why there was so little government angst over the Post's "revelations": aside from the fact that it revealed little that wasn't already known (Priest and Arkin withheld substantial amounts of information at the Government's request), even the impact of having the Post trumpet these facts was not a threat to much of anything, since there's nobody in a position to do much about this even if they wanted to. And few people seem to want to.
There is some slight overlap between Barthel's explantions and Greenwald's: the story did not fit with prevailing preferred elite narratives. But Greenwald provides a coherent explanation for what this means and why it so (in the paragraphs following the excerpt above). Barthel provides nothing similar, virtually no analysis at all--and, indeed, he actually adds to the obfuscations of hegemony, as we will see below.
Lots in this article worth highlighting, but at least it now mainstreams what the DFHs have known for at least 3 years since Roberts and Alito took the bench.
In its first five years, the Roberts court issued conservative decisions 58 percent of the time. And in the term ending a year ago, the rate rose to 65 percent, the highest number in any year since at least 1953.
The courts led by Chief Justices Warren E. Burger, from 1969 to 1986, and William H. Rehnquist, from 1986 to 2005, issued conservative decisions at an almost indistinguishable rate - 55 percent of the time.
They're using databases compiled by political scientists who assign decisions to a conservative-liberal rating system according to criteria like whether the court sided with the prosecutor (conservative outcome) or an individual against a corporation (liberal outcome). I think the acceleration is significant too, as Roberts and Alito grow into the jobs and hit their full stride, confident in their impunity.
This really says it all:
Four of the six most conservative justices of the 44 who have sat on the court since 1937 are serving now: Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Antonin Scalia and, most conservative of all, Clarence Thomas. (The other two were Chief Justices Burger and Rehnquist.) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the swing justice on the current court, is in the top 10.
When the "swing" vote at the "center" of the court is actually in the top 10 of consevative justices since they started measuring these things, I think I feel safe saying "Yes Virginia, the Supreme Court is packed with conservative extremists."
As one of those who used Dkos/R2000 data on various occasions, resting a fair amount of my own analysis on the assumption that the data was real, I feel personally implicated as well as violated by the revelations that R2000 fabricated its data. That it did so is now beyond dispute, since R2000 owner Del Ali admitted as much openly in his own defense in an email to TPM. His defense is that he didn't fabricate it out of thin air, but "merely" manipulated it within the margin of error:
Yes we weight heavily and I will, using t[h]e margin of error adjust the top line and when adjusted under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist, therefore all sub groups must be adjusted as well.
Although it is not crystal-clear what Ali is suggesting, one interpretation is that he feels he has the liberty "under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist" to adjust his topline results anywhere within the margin of error. Thus, if his raw data had the Democrat at 46 percent and the Republican at 44 percent, and had a margin of error of +/- 4 percent, the Democrat's number could presumably be adjusted by Ali to be anywhere from 42 percent to 50 percent, or the Republican's anywhere from 40 percent to 48 percent.
As you can see, this would give Ali quite a bit of discretion: he could adjust his poll to show essentially anything that he wanted, from a decent-sized lead for the Democrat to a modest one for the Republican. Needless to say, this is not what they teach you in Polling 101....
Long story short, the line between a pollster who is fabricating data and one who mutilates real data beyond recognition is rather blurry, perhaps even intractably so. While I wouldn't want to hire either one of them, it might make quite a bit of difference from a legal standpoint.
The amazing thing here is that Ali actually thinks his confession is a defense!
But he's hardly alone in this sort of delusion. His company includes the New York Times, which has made a similarly damning confession, confirming its conscious and intentional decision to stop correctly identifying waterboarding as torture once the Bush Administration took it up. As the abstract of the Shorensen Center report "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media" explained:
The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
Just like Del Ali, the New York Times thought that confessing was their best defense, as Michael Calderone reported for Yahoo! News: [emphasis added]
Earlier this week, we highlighted Nicholas Kristof's OP-ED in the New York Times about Gabon, a country in West-Central Africa where the rights of farmers are frequently in conflict with wildlife conservation efforts. One young village chief and farmer, Evelyn Kinga explained that she doesn't like elephants because they eat her cassava plants-a crop her livelihood depends on-because she doesn't benefit from rich foreigners who come to Gabon for eco-tourism.
But it doesn't have to be this way, says Raol du Toit, Director of the Rhino Conservation Trust in Zimbabwe. His organization works closely with farmers on the ground to help communities realize that protecting wildlife can be in their own best interest.
du Toit promotes "landscape-level planning" that takes into account the needs of wildlife, the environment, and farming communities. Rather than relying on development agencies and governments to decide where cattle fences should go or where farmers should plant their crops, local communities and stakeholders need to be part of the process. Development aid, says du Toit, should follow what local stakeholders need and perceive, not the other way around. Additionally, the Rhino Conservation Trust provides classroom materials for schools so that students may learn the connections between sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation at an early age. (See also Helping Farmers Benefit Economically from Wildlife Conservation)
And du Toit is not alone in his effort to improve the lives of farmers, as well as protect wildlife.
In Tanzania, the Jane Goodall Instutite (JGI) started as a center to research and protect wild chimpanzee populations in what is now, thanks to their efforts, Gombe National Park. But by the early 1990's the organization realized that in order to be successful it would have to start addressing the needs of the communities surrounding the park. JGI was planting trees to rebuild the forest but members of the community were chopping them down-not because they wanted to damage the work but because they needed them for fuel and to make charcoal.
In response, JGI started working with communities to develop government- mandated land use plans, helping them develop soil erosion prevention practices, agroforestry, and production of value-added products, such as coffee and palm oil. "These are services," says Pancras Ngalason Executive Director of JGI Tanzania, "people require in order to appreciate the environment" and that will ultimately help not only protect the chimps and other wildlife, but also to build healthy and economically viable communities. (See also: Rebuilding Roots in Environmental Education)
In Botswana, the Mokolodi Wildlife Reserve is doing more than just teaching students and the community about conserving and protecting wildlife and the environment, they're also educating students about permaculture. By growing indigenous vegetables, recycling water for irrigation, and using organic fertilizers-including elephant dung-the Reserve's Education Center is demonstrating how to grow nutritious food with very little water or chemical inputs.
When school groups come to learn about the animals, the reserve also teaches them about sustainable agriculture. Using the garden as a classroom in which to teach students about composting, intercropping, water harvesting, and organic agriculture practices, the Wildlife Reserve helps draw the connection between the importance of environmentally sustainable agriculture practices and the conservation of elephants, giraffes, impala, and various other animals and birds living in the area.(See also: Cultivating an Interest in Agriculture Conservation)
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This week, the blogosphere was seething with accounts of the deteriorating state of public education in the United States. On OpenLeft alone, there were far more than the usual number of posts related to public schools.
In a Quick Hit, Paul Rosenberg pointed to some of the gory details that appeared in an op-ed by Derrick Z. Jackson in the Boston Globe entitled "The death of public education: Lack of money is killing our schools." Specifically:
• Detroit is closing more than 40 schools
• Kansas City wants to close more than 40 percent of its school buildings
• Boston is slashing custodial staff and postponing building repairs
In a comment to Paul's QH, VLazlo linked to a news story about how charter schools in Philadelphia put taxpayer money is "at risk" by using public funds to develop lucrative side businesses that have nothing to do with educating kids.
In another QH, Bruce Dixon sent us to his insightful post at HuffPo where he made us aware that "Obama's version of school reform will dis-employ tens of thousands of highly qualified teachers, mostly minority women between 35 and 55 and pillars of whatever social life exists in those communities where unemployment is already at historic levels."
And in a diary on OL frontpager Adam Bink warned about the unprecedented influence that private foundations are having on public education. He questioned, quite rightly, whether giving rich foundations such as those backed by Bill Gates and WalMart's Walton family a "seat at the table" might lead to these institutions -- which tend to favor so-called reform measures such as charter schools and teacher merit pay -- "setting education policy."
Elsewhere on the 'net, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reported that America's longest and most ambitious experiment on using private school vouchers to create competition with public schools has produced absolutely nothing in terms of academic gains for students:
"About halfway into a five-year evaluation of Milwaukee's 20-year-old school voucher program, new data shows that groups of low-income students in the city who use public vouchers to attend private schools are still scoring about the same academically as their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools."
In the education press, alarm bells were also sounding. Susan H. Furman warns in an op-ed at Education Week that the Obama administration's most-favored methods of tying teacher evaluation to student tests scores, called "value added measurements," are being wildly over-sold. The problem:
"• Many tests cover sufficiently different content from one grade to the next that score gains do not have the same meaning across grades. Many state assessments, in fact, are not scaled to measure grade-to-grade growth or to make growth comparisons.
• Value-added estimates for a teacher can fluctuate for a variety of reasons, many not necessarily related to actual effectiveness at producing student gains on achievement tests. For example, high turnover of students throughout the year can affect the gains students make on achievement tests; and, if the class size is small, the scores of only a few students can affect the size of the gains.
• Factors other than an individual teacher's efforts affect student performance in any given year."
In the same issues of Education Week, William A. Proefriedt stated that today's "reformers" are "are blind to the complexity of the task" of improving teacher performance through changing teacher education and preparation.
"We go beyond all reasonable limits when we take the test scores as a proxy of student achievement or as a measure of the quality of the programs from which teachers graduated. We have been bewitched by the real promise of quantifying certain abilities, by our understandable desire to hold our institutions accountable, and by the significance we attach to our calling."
Among educators themselves, the American Association of School Administrators reported that a majority of school districts have eliminated personnel -- and anticipate further cuts. A total of two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents reported having to eliminate personnel positions for the 2009-10 school year, and 83 percent anticipate having to eliminate further positions in 2010-11. The reason for the cuts? Lack of state funding.
According to the National Governors Association:
"Due to the revenue declines, 43 states cut $31.3 billion in 2009. For fiscal year 2010, even with nearly $30 billion in new revenue, 36 states have been forced to cut $55.7 billion, with 30 states having cut both K-12 and higher education."
States foresee fiscal year 2011, which starts for most states July 1, 2010, to be the most difficult to date, and few see fiscal year 2012 much better. 36 states will have to fill a collective gap of at least $16.5 billion to return to fiscal 2008 state spending levels for K-12 education."
In fact (via multiple sources), about half of all states are poised to slash spending on K-12 education in fiscal 2011, while another handful are expected to keep funding level. Only a small number of states-Massachusetts and Pennsylvania among them-are proposing any kinds of increases, and those are modest.
Last but not least, an article in Education Week revealed the large number of rural high schools in the US that are "drop out factories." What makes the problem especially perplexing is that there is no widely agreed-upon method for measuring dropout rates. And schools that are rated as dropout factories by some methods are given top notch ratings by state officials and outside sources such as U.S. News & World Report.
With all the bad news about the state of public education in the United States emanating from multiple sources around the country, anyone who is at all concerned about the welfare of our nation's children and youth would want to get some sense that progressive leadership in our country has a grasp of the situation. Fortunately, that message was delivered at the end of the week in the form of an email from the Center for American Progress.
If this were an article written by a newcomer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and posted on a small blog, one could understand the ignorance implicit in a title that continues to depict Palestinians as violent. But it was written by Ethan Bronner, the New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, a Jewish American married to an Israeli whose son is now serving in the Israeli Defense Forces.
What Bronner's title, Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance, says is that Palestinians, all of a sudden, in spite of evidence to the contrary, are just turning away from violence (think suicide bombing). The long history of nonviolent Palestinian protest, the recent repression of peaceful demonstrations in Bil'in and Nil'in and elsewhere, the arrest of prominent peace activists, and military raids on the offices of peace activist organizations like the International Solidarity Movement or Stop the Wall are not mentioned.
The One About Better Protecting The Welfare Of Animals Is An Important Step In Improving Our Humanity!
(Stay tuned immediately after today's article for a special announcement)
Every once in a while I get to read and share with you my loyal readers some genuinely happy news. This article in the New York Times, is a perfect example.
Back in May, the Pentagon told the press that 1 in 7 Guantanamo detainees "returned to terrorism or militant activity." The New York Times ran with this lead, without even requesting a definition of "returned to terrorism or militant activity." Weeks later, the New York Times had to run a correction, essentially blaming the whole confusion on not receiving documents from the Pentagon. This was, of course, a ridiculous excuse. The Pentagon responded to my request for documentation in a matter of hours, with a pdf that described, entirely, how they define whether or not someone is suspected of returning to the battle field:
Why would anyone confess to a crime they did not commit? What would it take to get you to confess to a crime? For Christopher Ochoa, it took twenty hours of questioning and badgering and threats to get him to falsely confess to the murder of a woman in Austin, Texas. As a result, he spent twelve years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
Most people find it hard to understand how anyone could ever confess to a crime they did not commit. But it happens over and over again. False confessions are a well-documented reality, especially among vulnerable populations like juveniles and the mentally-impaired. Of all the DNA exonerations nationwide, false confessions occur in over 20 percent of them.
Last week, two major newspapers highlighted two different cases where the confessions of the defendants had been called into question.
Banned Techniques Yielded 'High Value Information,' Memo Says
Torture works! Who knew?
The source of this garbage is Admiral Dennis Blair, who is deeply committed to giving everybody who tortured detainees a free pass.
"I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past," he wrote, "but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given."
So it isn't exactly big news that this guy would claim his top-secret records prove that torture really works, and we're all so much safer because a few raggedy Arabs were (half) drowned, frozen, humiliated, beaten, kicked, suffocated, sleep-deprived, isolated, chained up like pretzels for days at a time and forced to poop and pee all over themselves, while their families were arrested, threatened, tortured, deported, and dispossessed.
The two driving trends here appear to be the decline of Democratic dominance in the South, which appears to have come to an end, and the increase in the Democratic advantage among younger voters, which is growing increaingly strong. Put this together with almost year-old data from Pew, that has long-term trend comparisons behind it (on the flip), and the case for rising Dem identification is increasingly strong.
Hey folks, I wanted to share my latest column with everyone here at OpenLeft -- a review of Bernard Goldberg's latest book, "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media".
-K
That certainly didn't take long. Just shy of a week after Barack Obama took the oath of office, becoming America's 44th president, the nation's foremost right-wing publishing house has released a new tome by Bernard Goldberg that seeks to trash the supposedly liberal "mainstream media" for being in the tank for Obama.
The three-ringed circus of liberal media bias cryptozoology is nothing new for Goldberg. He's been part of this factually challenged freak show for years. This isn't even his first book on the subject -- he wrote 2001's creatively titled, Bias.
In today's New York Times, an editorial hits one of my pet issues and peeves: how collectively as a country and a society, we let down our veterans, every single day.
We insist on their sacrificed, and praise their service, so don't equal their service with funding, support and help.
After the Vietnam War, the situation was similar to what it is now, in the respect that, a generation of veterans found themselves embroiled in a battle for benefits and care against a bureaucracy ill-suited for the task. Back then, The Vietnam Vet Survival Guide, was a best-selling book and great asset to those men and women.
Following a day in which Bush expressed regret over "Mission Accomplished" and "Dead or Alive," it seemed plausible that Condi Rice was trying to protect her legacy too.
A prank...except that wasn't really tricking anybody (we generally knew the war wasn't over, universal healthcare hadn't yet happened and Bush wasn't standing trial for war crimes).
A satire...except it wasn't really funny. The reactions on the subway weren't laughter.
STATE BLOGS
Earlier this week, we 
