Griper Blade: A Trickle When We Need a Flood

It's one of those good news/bad news things. Yesterday, the Justice Department released nine of the Bush administration's secret memos [all PDF] detailing legal opinions on the president's "War on Terror." What they reveal is a frightening disregard for American principles. Knowing that some of these memos would eventually come out, the Bush administration renounced the arguments put forward in them -- days before the new president took office.

McClatchy Newspapers:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, the Justice Department renounced some of its own sweeping legal justifications, which were enacted after the 9/11 attacks, for spying on Americans and for harsh interrogations of terror suspects.

In a memo written five days before President Barack Obama took office, Steven Bradbury, the then-principal deputy assistant attorney general, warned that a series of opinions issued secretly by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel "should not be treated as authoritative for any purpose."

Bradbury said he wrote the 11-page document to confirm that "certain propositions" in memos issued by the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 "do not reflect the current views of this office."

They were just spitballin', throwing ideas at the wall to see which stuck, running them up the flag pole to see who saluted. Never mind that, from 2001 to 2003, those legal opinions remained unopposed by the Bush administration -- unused bullets in their arsenal of legal defense.

And, believe it or not, this is the good news part -- that these memos saw the light of day at all. The bad news is that the Obama administration is sitting on "dozens" more... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Shutting Down Gitmo

While the most visible military action is in Afghanistan, America is acting elsewhere. We now have troops in the Philippines, helping to train that country's armed forces to go after terrorist cells that have executed an American, and still hold hostages. Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy. Our Navy is patrolling the coast of Africa to block the shipment of weapons and the establishment of terrorist camps in Somalia.
-George W. Bush, 2002 State of the Union address

Yeah, about those terrorists in Bosnia -- Bush's case against them was just thrown out of court. Judge Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court in Washington has said the government's evidence was too weak to hold the five Algerians. Six years after Bush bragged about arresting them, they were ordered released from the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. The case against them rested entirely on "a classified document from an unnamed source," the judge said. "To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation."

This was the first legal test of the evidence against the men and the case against all of them gets thrown out. This is the kind of evidence we've been relying on to justify throwing people in a hole for years -- evidence so thin it practically gets laughed out of court. Meanwhile, the five men have lost six years of their lives to our tropical prison camp.

Far from making us safer, Guantánamo is actually losing cases. People leave there with a deep hatred for the American government. Think about it, if you were snatched out of your bed, flown halfway around the world, locked into a prison camp, abused, tortured, and then sent home, wouldn't you give very serious thought to becoming a terrorist? Slap any other name than the United States of America on that country and wouldn't you see a moral justification in bringing that nation down? That's what the prison at Guantánamo Bay is doing for us. And that's all it's doing for us...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

ACLU: Justice Dept. Institutes 'Racial Profiling as a Matter of Policy'

clipped from www.aclu.org New FBI guidelines governing investigations were released today after being signed by Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The guidelines replace existing bureau guidelines for five types of investigations: general criminal, national security, foreign intelligence, civil disorders and demonstrations.  The ACLU has been vocal in its disapproval of the overly broad guidelines, citing both the FBI’s and DOJ’s documented records of internal abuse.   The new guidelines reduce standards for beginning “assessments” (precursors to investigations), conducting surveillance and gathering evidence, meaning the threshold to beginning investigations across the board will be lowered.  More troubling still, the guidelines allow a person’s race or ethnic background to be used as a factor in opening an investigation, a move the ACLU believes may institute racial profiling as a matter of policy.

The piece goes on:

“The attorney general today gave the FBI a blank check to open investigations of innocent Americans based on no meaningful suspicion of wrongdoing,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “The new guidelines provide no safeguards against the FBI’s improperly using race and religion as grounds for suspicion. They also fail to sufficiently prevent the government from infiltrating groups whose viewpoints it doesn’t like. The FBI has shown time and time again that is incapable of policing itself and there is good reason to believe that these guidelines will lead to more abuse.”

Poll: Obama Leads Wisconsin

clipped from strategicvision.biz Below are the results of a three-day poll of likely voters in the state of Wisconsin. Results are based on telephone interviews with 800 likely voters in Wisconsin, aged 18+, and conducted September 26-28, 2008 by telephone. The margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points. 1. If the election for President were held today would you support the Democratic ticket of Barack Obama and Joseph Biden or the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin? Obama/Biden 49% McCain/Palin 40% Other 2% Undecided 9% 6. Which presidential candidate do you believe would be best able to handle the economy, Barack Obama or John McCain? Barack Obama 56% John McCain 37% Undecided 7%

This one's a little personal. If I see one more electoral map that shows the Badger state as a toss-up, I'm going to hurt someone. Wisconsin isn't going McCain, it hasn't gone GOP since the Reagan landslide.

Other fun results; Bush is really unpopular here -- only a 15% job approval rating. More evidence that McCain's done here.

He's still spending money here, though. You can't watch TV for an hour without seeing a McCain ad.

Glad to see him blowing that cash on a lost cause.

One Million Names on Terrorist Watch List

clipped from www.aclu.org The nation's terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government's own reported numbers for the size of the list. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon." Controls on the watch lists called for by the ACLU included: due process a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based tight criteria for adding names to the lists rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists.

Do they really think there are 1,000,000 terrorists in the US? How absurd does this whole police state thing have to get before we're all either up in arms or laughing at how ridiculous it all is?