Guantanamo detainee Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi successfully moved to dismiss his own habeas corpus proceeding, on the ground that he did not want to participate in the process that he believed is entirely a sham. My interview with his now former attorney Robert Rachlin is here. BTW… given the astounding results to date… after over seven years, exactly three detainees have been released pursuant to habeas corpus order (while around two dozen more have been ordered released at one time or another, but are still at GTMO… with still over 200 in the hopper…), Mr. Al-Sharbi may have a point. Al-Sharbi,...
Continue reading...March 2009
What’s wrong with this picture?
O.K… five GTMO “high value detainees” including Ron Jeremy Khalid Sheik Mohammed have long tried to confess their role in planning the September 11th attacks, as they did once again in a joint five-way document submitted to the now halted military commissions supposedly trying them for their terrorist acts. And of course, regular readers know that the horrifically inhumane conditions at GTMO include extreme isolation where, other than the occasional gloved hand of a guard, the prisoners have no human contact at all. Which is why it seems so curious that the “high value detainees” are permitted to meet among...
Continue reading...Lawyer war criminals still out there
The Grey Lady gives us this reminder that the mafia consigliori lawyers in the Bush Administration who crafted the “legal opinions” nominally permitting other government officials to commit torture and other war crimes… are still out there. Some, like John Yoo, have tenure at a major university in the San Francisco Bay Area. Others, like Jay Bybee, had good timing, and have lifetime tenure on a federal court, also in the Bay Area. Jim Haynes, it seems, got a job with Chevron. Others, however, such as arch-villain David Addington and arch-stooge Alberto Gonzales… are having trouble finding jobs. As time...
Continue reading...Half a loaf…
Good news, bad news, from the U.S. Supreme Court in the tortured (pun intended) case of Saleh Al-Marri: the Court declined review of the case as moot, but vacated the loathsome Fourth Circuit case that held, as a matter of law, that the United States is a dictatorship. [You will recall that Al-Marri, a legal resident, has been detained for years in the brig in Charleston in isolation condition without charge as “an enemy combatant”.] What’s that TD… an American court held that the US of A is a dictatorship? Well, yes: the Fourth Circuit in Richmond held that there...
Continue reading...Too big to fail
This blog devotes many of its column inches to discussing the collapse of our nation’s moral authority and the ongoing collapse of its adherence to its own laws… we do occasionally take a break to discuss… its economic collapse. And so today… Joe Nocera gives us this column in the Grey Lady walking us through the AIG fiasco, noting the various ways in which the denizens of world’s largest insurance company American International Group, or AIG, gamed the system and gamed its own sterling AAA credit rating via regulatory loopholes and everything else it could think of in order to...
Continue reading...
Recent Comments