tdog

Thomas Nephew writes in to note that we are up against something that is no laughing matter. Attorney General Michael “Good Fascist Soldier” Mukasey is quite literally asking Congress to declare a permanent war and an all time amnesty on Bush Administration law breaking. This is not out of the pages of The Onion. It seems clear that just as Mukasey was serious in refusing to pronounce waterboarding as torture (hey, maybe Torquemada was just using “enhanced interrogation” on those heretics… you can’t call it “torture,” right?)… there is no reason not to believe he is deadly serious on this....

Candace sends along a note about this item, a mention from the opening remarks at Gitmo of the prosecutor on the trial of Hitler’s chauffeur OBL’s driver and auto mechanic, Salim Hamdan. “If they hadn’t shot down the fourth plane it would’ve hit the dome,” Stone, a Navy officer, said in his opening remarks. Draw your own conclusions; Candace asks “slip or mistake?” It’s one or the other. I thought the “let’s roll” explanation had to be preserved at all costs; apparently, securing a show-trial conviction of a bit player may be more important. Stay tuned, and try not to...

While many of us marvel at the disaster that the Bush II Administration has been with respect to American foreign policy and with respect to our Constitutional values, we sometimes forget just what an unmitigated disaster the Bush II Administration has been with respect to the national economy and American fiscal integrity. Well, no more… because today it is announced that the President who inherited a budget surplus from his predecessor appears on track to break his own record for budget deficit with a staggering $482 billion deficit predicted for the coming fiscal year. Revenues would be expected to be...

It seems a classic case of synergy: the formerly sainted Sen. John McCain has changed his once (for a Republican) strong pro-environmental stance calling for American energy responsibility, and now joins the Bush Administration in suggesting that the ban on offshore oil drilling be lifted. As a result: oil industry campaign cash has gushed in to McCain. On this one, I’ll accept McCain’s campaign people’s saying that this is about McCain trying to pander to the voters (a la the gas tax holiday he and Hillary touted), rather than about attempting to pander to the oil industry for campaign cash....

Steven Wax, a graduate of Colgate University and Harvard University Law School, is a former assistant district attorney in Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, where, among other prosecutions, he worked on the “Son of Sam” case. Mr. Wax is currently in his seventh term as the Federal Defender for the District of Oregon. He is the author of “Kafka Comes to America: Fighting For Justice in the War on Terror, a Federal Defender’s Inside Account” documenting his work on behalf of Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield, accused of a connection to the 2004 Madrid bombings, and Adel Hamad, a Sudanese national...

And so, having been established to have committed the heinous crime of embarrassing the Bush Administration before the Supreme Court, it seems that the show-trial must go on, and Salim “OBL’s driver and auto-mechanic” Hamdan’s military commission trial has commenced at Guantanamo Bay, with a selection of military jurors. Hamdan has a fourth grade education, and basically claims he was doing a menial job for a better paycheck than he could get in Yemen. Although the rules are being made up as they go along, it seems that the current military judge, Capt. Keith Allred of the Navy, isn’t totally...

After making resisting the calls of the then newly elected Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress the signature play of the second half of his second term in office, it now seems the President is willing to accept some kind of timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, as long as the timetables are vague and are called “a general time horizon”. Call it “The Surge(TM)” has been successful, call it our efforts at belaying civil war by arming the (formerly and in the future bothersome) Baathist dead-enders cooperative Sunnis has, thus far been successful, or call it...

Al Gore gave his “energy speech” in Philadelphia yesterday, duly annotated (to account for various forms of skepticism) here. The sainted former Vice-President acknowledged the potential “exaggeration” in some of his goals… but then, if he’s right, and the survival of our nation is at stake… perhaps he has a bit of a point? Given that the sole raison d’etre of so many these days is sucking short term profit out of the system as if The Rapture really were going to come later this year… maybe someone who actually looks more than two quarters ahead is just too maddening...

Certainly, don’t tell it to me, sayeth U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson, who denied the motion of GTMO detainee and alleged “OBL driver” Salim Hamdan for a stay of his show-trial military commission hearing. Hamdan, you recall, had won a Supreme Court case challenging the earlier version of commissions, only to have Congress pass a law calling for comparably vague and arbitrary commissions… the theme remains the same, really… any procedural unfairness is o.k. as long as it leads to a finding of guilt, be it hearsay, evidence obtained by torture, or “secret” evidence not provided to the prisoner....

By a pair of 5-4 rulings, the extraordinarily conservative (for example, the late Sen. Jesse Helms singlehandedly kept most Bill Clinton appointments off it for years) 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, in the ongoing saga of Saleh al-Marri (his counsel Jonathan Hafetz is interviewed here) ruled that the Bush Adminstration (1) has the power to hold any of us– ANY. OF. US.– indefinitely, solely at the President’s whim, if he invokes the magic word “terrorist”, but (in this case, a very small but) (2) Mr. al-Marri (or whatever poor hapless bastard is involved be he named Padilla, or...