drone predator by RG1033

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This literally translates to “Who will guard the guards themselves? Or more commonly “Who watches the watchmen?” it is an important question for any democratic government. Force of arms is generally reserved to the State, to a greater or lesser degree, and it is the responsibility of the State as a whole to maintain control of its various armed forces.

One of the things that differentiate a democracy from a dictatorship is the civilian control of its intelligence and armed forces. Anytime these forces become a power onto themselves there is a danger to the idea of democracy.

Which is why today’s article in the Washington Post about the growing Counter Terrorism Center at the CIA is so troubling. Since the 9/11 attacks the CTC has increased 7 fold, from 300 in 2001 to over 2000 today.

If this new “agency within an agency” was merely performing the traditional intelligence gathering of the CIA in a counter terrorism role, it would not be so troubling. However this group is in charge the CIA’s drone program as well as working very closely with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Last year the CIA was in command of 118 drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets. Or at least that is the number we think as the CIA never officially acknowledges its drone program, consisting of 30 or so Predator and Reaper drones. Whatever the number of strikes and drones this is a major change in mission for the CIA which is an agency that was created for intelligence gathering rather than operations.

The functions of intelligence analysts have begun to change at the CIA. Now there is a new career path there called “targeters”. While they are still intelligence analysts at the core their primary job is to develop information that allows the CIA to recruit weak links, find meeting places and, of course, find and target so called High Value targets for drone strikes.

While there will be many who don’t have a problem with “killing the bad guys” this is a very troubling development to me. Leaving aside for a moment the legality of assassinating people in other countries who have not been convicted of a crime, even American citizens, the issue for me is one of control.
Read the rest of this entry →

, on Flickr”]

DSC_0104 by g[wiz

On Fox “News” this Sunday criminal Former VP Dick Cheney said the following about returning to the use of waterboarding in terror interrogations:

I certainly would advocate it; I’d be a strong supporter of it

This is an area of contention that I have had with President Obama nearly from the first days of his administration. Namely the purely political decision not to follow through on our legal responsibility to investigate any credible allegations of torture and to prosecute those who were found responsible.

The fact that the criminal Bush Administration admitted to waterboarding at least three of our detainees, which has been by US and international law an act of torture and a potential war crime yet none of the top level people have ever been investigated for it is a national shame that will not be wiped away for a long time to come.

Worse it has left the issue of torture and waterboarding in particular open. At this late point it is easy to get academic about this form of torture. Given that I thought I would give everyone a taste of what is would be like to be waterboarded. This is a first person fictionalization of it, it is my best attempt to reproduce what a person would feel in that situation.

Warning: if you have been a victim of torture, you might not want to read this. I have been told that it can be triggering for traumatic memories and while I want everyone to get as visceral as possible an understanding of torture I don’t want to traumatize anyone:

Your feet are shackled, and so are your wrists. When you were lead into the room you saw that it did not have the usual table, this room had a board, and a drain in the floor.

You are blindfolded by the guards and roughly forced to lie on the wet wooden board. Even though you are shackled they tie you down to the board with three ropes, one across your chest, on across your waist and one across your legs. You are now completely unable to move, your head is below the level of your feet making the blood rush to your head.
Read the rest of this entry →

Bodineism started as a way for me to highlight the nitwittery of the Republicans in the 111th Congress. They say and do really gob smacking things and I post about comparing them to that gormless but loveable hillbilly Jethro Bodine. But I have to wonder if I have actually, through some unintended and accidental sorcery called this disease into reality (I’m probably taking too much on myself with that, still)?

It is one thing to misinterpret the Constitution, it is open for interpretation and people can be honestly wrong, but it is quit another for a Member of Congress in a leadership position to propose action that is completely outside the boundaries of the Constitution. Which is exactly what Eric Cantor is doing.

He is proposing and will force the House to bring to a vote a measure he is calling the “Government Shutdown Prevention Act”. What this Act will say is that if the Senate does not pass a budget measure by April 6th, then HR 1, the Republicans draconian and job slaughtering bill (which, by the way the Senate has already voted down) will become the law of the land.

I hear you all going “But, but, but… Doesn’t the Senate have to pass a bill and the President sign it for it to be law?” Why, yes, yes it does. It seems that the raven haired, square jawed Virginia Republican who is the House Majority Leader does not understand how the body he has been part of for a decade now works.

If there were an “All Time Jethro Bodineism Award” it is certain that Rep. Cantor would be earning himself a place in the nominees. It is easy to dismiss this as insane and a stunt, but I see a bigger picture emerging among Republicans nation wide.

The lawless behavior of Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has shown that he and his Republicans have a shocking disregard for the laws of their state. They have broken and bent the rules to pass their union busting bill and have even defied a court order in the implementation of the law.
Read the rest of this entry →

"Lawless Center by Thomas Hawk, on Flickr"

Everyone who reads these posts knows that I like to take shots at Republicans. No big surprise there, but it is becoming really kind of scary what Republicans are doing in regards to the rule of law.

Dad used to describe the law as a game where the people who know the rules the best mostly win. That is why it was so important that average folks have the best legal representation available, if they did not have it they would be run over by the companies and people who did.

That worked for most of my life, but it seems that the Wisconsin Republicans lead by Koch Brothers wholly owned Governor Walker won’t even follow the rules of the game. They pulled a fast one with sending a bill that had not been passed by the State Senate to conference committee and then declaring that the Union busting provisions were not in fact financially based.

By making this change they could pass the conference committee bill by a simple majority and they did. The problem was that they did not allow the 24 hours that Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law requires.

It got them into legal water hot enough that a district judge put a stay on the Secretary of State from publishing the law, which is part of the process and the law from being implemented.

The Judge said:

“I do, therefore, restrain and enjoin the further implementation of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10. The next step in implementation of that law would be the publication of that law by the secretary of state. He is restrained and enjoined from such publication until further order of this court.”

Now the lawless Republicans in Wisconsin feel like they have found a way around this. They did not have the Sec. State publish the law, but the Legislative Reference Bureau instead. They are claiming that this means that the law will go into affect tomorrow morning.

It is always an incredibly bad idea to try to thwart Judges rulings. They do not take it kindly and they don’t ever forget. It still remains to be seen if Judge Sumi will go further to say that the law can not be enforced until the case regarding the Open Meetings Law is resolved. At a guess I would say yes, like I said, judges do not like it when you try to make an end run around their rulings.
Read the rest of this entry →

Graphic courtesy of lazyevaluator via Flickr

File it under going down the wrong damned path, again. The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration is preparing to lift the ban on new military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. Shortly after he was inaugurated President Obama directed Defense Secretary Gates to order a freeze on new indictments for detainees at our national shame of a prison camp. The intent was two fold, one to review the incredibly slipshod cases against the men held there and to allow for the planning to begin closing the prison camp.

Nearly two years have gone by and while the review of cases has been done, we are no closer to closing the camp than when President Bush was in office. It is not completely the fault of the President that the camp has not closed. There has to be funding to move and house the detainees (they aren’t prisoners because they have not been convicted of anything) somewhere else and the Congress has shown just how lily-livered they are by consistently voting against funding to do exactly that.

Which is not to say that the Executive Branch is doing the right thing either. It seems that one of the first people to be charged, perhaps within weeks of ending the ban is one
Abu al-Rahim al Nashiri who is accused in planning the bombing of the U.S. Cole in 2000. If that name sounds vaguely familiar it is because Mr. Nashiri is the third known person to have been tortured by use of waterboarding by the United States government.

Read the rest of this entry →

It is a bit of a philosophical conundrum if one can actually do good through bad methods. Of course you have to define good and bad, which are always value judgments. Let’s make this a little more concrete; one of the Presidents unfulfilled promises is to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. It is a national shame that a prison was built specifically to try to avoid the legal system of the United States. There have been credible allegations of torture there, as well as statements by Bush era officials that the totality of treatment there also rises to the level of torture.

Over time the numbers of prisoners held there have been reduced from a high of over 800 to 174 today. The problem is that for those 174 they are basically in legal limbo. 50 of them are in the category of having no plans to charge nor will they be released. This is an obvious problem for our system of law. For the remaining 124 the plan has been to treat them like other criminals, charge them in federal court, present the evidence against them and see if we can convince a jury they should be imprisoned in one of our Super-Max prisons here the United States, just like any other criminal.

However the fear mongering by the Republicans and the acceptance of it by some of our more….oh hell I am just going to say it cowardly Democrats, has made this a political issue. In the recently passed Defense Authorization Bill, language was included that prevents the spending of military money for moving the prisoners from Guantanamo to the United States, even for trials and such. The language also limits but not completely prohibits the Executive branch from releasing the prisoners to a third country without a series of certifications and exemptions that, in practice, will make it all but impossible.

The White House and the President are still clear in their desire to close one of national shames, the Gitmo prison, but to do so they may have to resort to tactics used and abused by the criminal Bush administration, namely a signing statement.

Read the rest of this entry →

My father loved the law. He loved it because it was an attempt to provide balance without resort to violence. Note the attempt in that sentence, it is important to recognize that justice is not about exact balancing but about a society making a concerted effort to balance the harm done by one person or group of people to others. We have seen some very serious hits to the one of the pillars of the rule of law, its universal application regardless of who is the perpetrator. Our nation is going to suffer from this as long as those who ordered and carried out torture in contravention of our laws and treaties are uninvestigated and unprosecuted. Still the fabric of the rule of law is holding on, even in the face of these insults.

In Murfreesboro TN, a judge has ruled against a requested injunction against the building of a mosque. This is the same building site that was the victim of apparent arson earlier this year. A local anti-Muslim group filed for an injunction against the mosque on the premise that the County board that approved it had broken its own rules in doing so.

However when they got to court they spent much of their time trying to malign Islam, rather than focus on the facts and the harm they claimed was done to the plaintiffs. This is the where we heard arguments that Islam is not a religion. It got so crazy that the Department of Justice had to issue a formal opinion that Islam is indeed a religion for under the laws in the U.S.

Read the rest of this entry →

Let’s face it, people hate bankers. There are a lot of reasons to hate them these days, given that unbridled greed and a total lack of concern for anything other enriching themselves is in large part why we are in the mess we are right now. This is why you are likely to see more of what we are seeing in New York State right now.

In some counties in New York judges are not putting up with the shoddy and frankly fraudulent work in foreclosure cases. We have heard about the major banks delaying foreclosures for a while as they “Checked the paperwork process” then declaring that everything was copasetic and going back to full steam ahead in foreclosing on properties. However there really was no chance that they could fix a massive system filled with massive problems in the three weeks that they held foreclosures in abeyance.

The reality is that it is job of the courts to scrutinize the paperwork of the banks in any foreclosure case, just as it is the banks responsibility to file the correct paper work with a clear chain of standing if they want to repossess property from the current owners. In Nassau, Suffolk and King’s county if you bring shoddy or fraudulent paperwork before the judges you are likely to get a nasty surprise.

According the Washington Post, last year a Long Island judge decided that he had enough. He found that the mortgage companies paperwork was so flawed and their behavior so repugnant (the judges word not mine) that he voided the mortgage and gave the house to the family. The judge found that based on the paper work which was presented the mortgage company could not prove that it had standing to foreclose. The chain of evidence as to who the loan was sold to was so broken and unclear the judge felt justified in granting ownership the family.

Read the rest of this entry →

In the movie Witness, there is a scene where a little Amish boy, who has witnessed a murder, takes the gun of the detective who is there to protect him from a chest of drawers. He is caught by his grandfather who sits him down for a talk. The grandfather asks if the boy would use this gun to kill. The boy says that he would only kill a bad man. The grandfather asks “How will you know who is the bad man?” This is the central point of our system of justice, we don’t just assume that someone is a bad man before punishing them, we have an elaborate process designed to require proof of actions before we punish.

Unfortunately our trauma with terrorism has eroded this system. Today, as you read this, there is a list of people around the world who are targeted for death. They are suspected of being involved with terror plots, and some of them are your fellow citizens. If they are found anywhere in the world by our forces they will be killed. Not captured and brought to trial, not attempted to be captured, but killed out right.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed suit challenging the legality of this policy. There is an Islamic cleric named Anwar Al-Aulaqi who has been implicated in both the Fort Hood shootings and the Fruit of the Boom bomber plots. He has made many anti-American statements including the active encouragement of terrorism.

Read the rest of this entry →

There are a lot of reasons to be frothing at the mouth angry at the criminal Bush administration. One of the biggest is the way that they not only managed to overturn a half century of certainty about what torture is and the use of it, in doing so they have also extended the immunity of those committing torture in the name of national security. The use of the State Secrets privilege to quash cases brought by torture victims was the standard operating procedure in the Bush administration.

It has sadly continued in the Obama administration. Without letting our current Executive Branch off the hook at all, it is easy to understand how that happens. How many of us have ever been willing to give up privileges we have, even if we are fairly sure it is not a good idea for anyone to have them? Since no one, not even the former V.P. Dick Cheney is the villain in the movie of their life, everyone thinks they will use these powers only for good.

This is why we need groups like the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights to fight against the expansion of governmental power and accountability for any illegal acts the government might commit.

The CCR is filing for certiorari with the Supreme Court in the case of Saleh et al v. Titan et al. This case is a civil suit brought by 250 Iraqis and their widows against two U.S. contractors. The case revolves around the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in the early days of the occupation. The Iraqis are brought suit claiming that they were tortured by employees of Titan Corporation (which is now called L-3 Services, ever notice the worst offenders keep changing their names?) and a company called CACI International.

These two companies were hired by the U.S. Military to provide interpretation and interrogation services. The Iraqis claim all manner of abuse at the hands of the defendants including rape, beatings which resulted in the death of the detainees and having to watch family members suspended from a ceiling and beaten. The man who was hung from the ceiling and beaten died from this treatment.

Read the rest of this entry →