Torture Prosecutor Tops 70,000 Questions for Obama on Change.Gov
A whopping 70,000 questions poured into Change.gov over the past week, in response to the Obama transition team’s call for citizen queries to the President-Elect. After votes from about 100,000 people, the top ranked question asks Obama whether he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and illegal surveillance by the U.S. government.
The national press corps has not raised this issue with Obama since his victory. (When it surfaced in April, Obama said he would order his attorney general to “immediately review” the potential crimes.) And while the leading question in the last Change.gov forum was dispatched breezily — Will you legalize marijuana? No. — this one is far more challenging, both substantively and politically.
The Times notes that Obama’s team has “not said” whether it will even answer [the torture prosecutions] question, though ignoring the question that came in first out of 74,000 would turn this exercise into a farce. A terse, evasive answer would be similarly unacceptable. After all, there would be little point in this online dialogue if it reiterates things we already know, (Obama is not in N.O.R.M.L.), and refuses to provide new information.
Yeah, let’s see if the call for Patrick Fitzgerald as an special prosecutor investigating allegations of torture gets this eleven-word response:
President-Elect Obama is not in favor of the investigation of torture.
I doubt it. I believe it will get a very thoughtful, reasoned response, much like the other four questions that were answered in the first round. Which just goes further in showing us how marginalized the drug war discussion is in Washington.
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KeithO nails it. So does the Boston Globe:
The death of a taboo – 2008 Presidential Campaign Blog – Political Intelligence – Boston.com
ST. PAUL — One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.
The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers’ subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.
The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one’s opponents to Hitler.
The story of the Bruce E. Ivins, the Ft. Detrick bio-weapons researcher suspected in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five, does not add up. We’re being told he committed suicide by overdosing on Tylenol with codeine.
The anthrax attacks were the cement that bonded America to the War on Islamic Terror in Iraq theme being pushed by the Cheneyburton maladministration long before 9/11. Remember? Powdered weaponized anthrax sent to two Democratic senators and a network news anchor (and the Enquirer, to help scare the “low-info” voters), the Capitol shut down and all of Congress terrorized, John W. McCain positing that anthrax came from Iraq, ABC News quoting “four well-placed sources” that tests showed the anthrax contained bentonite, a signature of Saddam’s arsenal, when no such tests were ever conducted, and after they were, found no bentonite.
The Washington Post reports that Ivins didn’t even have access to this powdered form of anthrax. How did he get ahold of it? How was he having those containment accidents without anyone at one of our most secure facilities speaking up or noticing? Who were ABC News’s four “well-placed sources”? What did John McCain know?
Do you wonder if in the afterlife, Bruce Ivins and Lee Oswald are comparing notes?
These latest items make the suicide story even harder to believe:
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Why is the White House so afraid of letting our Constitutional system of justice work? Now that the Supreme Court has ruled detainees can challenge their detention in court, the Cheneyburton Maladministration wants you to think that suddenly there will be terrorists walking the streets! Yup, if we can’t hold them secretly without rights and trials and torture them from time to time, the only other option is to let the most dangerous killers in the world run free throughout small town America.
White House says ruling could free detainees in US – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – The White House said Thursday that dangerous detainees at Guantanamo Bay could end up walking Main Street U.S.A. as a result of last month’s Supreme Court ruling about detainees’ legal rights. Federal appeals courts, however, have indicated they have no intention of letting that happen.
“I’m sure that none of us want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed walking around our neighborhoods,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said about al-Qaida’s former third in command.
“We are in uncharted territory, and we have never had enemy combatants afforded constitutional rights like all of us have, so anybody who thinks that they know exactly what’s going to happen if a detainee challenges his detention — his or her detention — in court, they’re not being honest because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Perino said.
“But there is considered judgment, from many federal government lawyers — all the way up to the attorney general of the United States_ that it is a very real possibility that a dangerous detainee could be released into the United States as a result of this Supreme Court decision.”
“The judge might say to the United States, ‘You don’t have enough evidence to hold this person,’” Perino said. “And then what do we do? … Is he allowed to leave? And if so, is he picked up by immigration? Even if that’s the case, they’re only allowed to be held for six months.”
Wait a minute, do you mean to say that if we can’t prove we even have enough probable cause to detain someone we suspect is a dangerous killer, much less be able to prove in a court of law that the detainee is a dangerous killer, then these people we just have a hunch about being dangerous killers will be stalking our kids at the swimming pool this summer?
Or could it be that most of the people rounded up into Guantanamo are not dangerous killers, but just poor losers who ended up on the wrong side of a tribal feud and were turned over for some bounty money? Could it be you don’t have enough evidence to stand up in court because there was no evidence to be found, you just wanted to round up Ay-rabs and do unspeakable things to them in a “shock and awe” psychological campaign?
Border Agents Can Search Laptops Without Cause, Appeals Court Rules | Threat Level from Wired.com
Federal agents at the border do not need any reason to search through travelers’ laptops, cell phones or digital cameras for evidence of crimes, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, extending the government’s power to look through belongings like suitcases at the border to electronics.
The unanimous three-judge decision reverses a lower court finding that digital devices were “an extension of our own memory” and thus too personal to allow the government to search them without cause. Instead, the earlier ruling said, Customs agents would need some reasonable and articulable suspicion a crime had occurred in order to search a traveler’s laptop.
On appeal, the government argued that was too high a standard, infringing upon its right to keep the country safe and enforce laws. Civil rights groups, joined by business traveler groups, weighed in, defending the lower court ruling.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government, finding that the so-called border exception to the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches applied not just to suitcases and papers, but also to electronics.
Well, gosh, if you wanted any privacy, you shoulda just stayed in the US, right?
The courts didn’t decide on whether you have to help them look through your laptop, as in giving them logins and passwords and decrypting your data. So go get that 256-bit hard-disk and USB drive encryption software that has no “government backdoor” encoding, and just let ‘em search all the scrambled bits they want.
New anti-drug campaign equates smoking pot with terrorism – Haaretz – Israel News
Israel’s Anti-Drug Authority has launched a new campaign featuring Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, aimed at deterring Israelis from smoking marijuana.
As part of the campaign, the authority has published a poster showing the Hezbollah leader emerging genie-like from a bong.
Underneath the image, the poster reads: “Hezbollah is clearly planning to flood Israel with narcotics. Narcotics pose a strategic threat to Israeli society. Whoever uses narcotics is giving a hand to the next terrorist attack.â€
The Israeli media last week quoted senior Israeli security sources as saying that Hezbollah is planning to flood Israel with drugs in an effort to harm its citizens.
Police and IDF troops on the same day stopped the largest shipment of pure heroin ever to be intercepted on Israel’s border with Lebanon, a total of 32.5 kilograms, with an estimated street value of NIS 30 million.
Gee, Israel’s only five years behind the US effort to link bongs with bombs and tokin’ with terrorism in an ad campaign that was roundly criticized not only for the idiocy of its message, but for the fact that the ads had the opposite of the intended effect – adults and teens distrust these alarmist messages and rates of use and favorable perceptions of marijuana among teens may actually increase.
Plus, how exactly is it that Hezbollah forces these helpless Israeli citizens to take drugs? Doesn’t there have to be a demand for drugs in order for the so-called “flood†strategy to be effective? I also wonder how much of that pure heroin originated from Afghanistan, where we’ve let the Taliban regain power from the profits of the country’s farmers producing most of the world’s heroin? Wouldn’t it be more strategic to focus on terrorists’ production of heroin than to demonize Israeli pot smokers?
Terrorists are making their money from heroin, not marijuana. Even so, a heroin addict is not to blame for Hezbollah’s profit from drug dealing, prohibition is to blame. If that heroin addict was getting a maintenance dose from a government clinic, there would be less profit for Hezbollah.
The House has passed the FISA bill without the retroactive immunity for the telecom companies. You know, the “Protect AT&T Act” that George W. Bush wanted so his lawbreaking by spying on you without warrants couldn’t be investigated. The immunity that the Senate caved on.
The House has just passed the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 3773, to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to establish a procedure for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence, and for other purposes, by a vote of 213-197-1. The revised House legislation to amend FISA grants new authorities for conducting electronic surveillance against foreign targets while preserving the requirement that the government obtain an individualized FISA court order, based on probable cause, when targeting Americans at home or abroad. The House bill also strongly enhances oversight of the Administration’s surveillance activities. Finally, the House bill does not provide retroactive immunity for telecom companies but allows the courts to determine whether lawsuits should proceed.
Now the ball’s in Shrub’s court. Pelosi’s daring him to veto this thing and have to explain why it’s so necessary for the telephone company to spy on everything everyone does, says, or reads, but not so necessary that he’d sign a bill that doesn’t protect them from lawsuits.
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