Employed Criminals Funded By Tax Dollars, But Who The Fuck Cares?

Digby comments on this.

From Technicalities by digby:

To me, this is fairly easy even though I think that these Blackwater contractors were likely guilty. If the Bush Justice department broke the law in the course of their prosecution (probably on purpose, mind you) then the judge had no choice but to dismiss these charges. It's the way our system works. But the case brings up an interesting problem: what if the government doesn't really want to prosecute some criminals because they've employed them to commit the crime?

I Know The Feeling

That smirk, combined with the jokes about serious matters, are two of George W. Bush’s worst qualities. (Of course, there are many more.) Instead of throwing shoes, which would have only broken my television, I frequently gave Bush the finger. It made me feel better. I feel empathy for Muntadher al-Zaidi. I have never felt empathy for George W. Bush.

From Iraqi shoe thrower: Bush's 'soulless smile' set me off:

Muntadher al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist on trial for throwing his shoes last year at then-President George W. Bush, said the former American leader's "bloodless and soulless smile" and his joking banter provoked him.

Al-Zaidi threw both of his shoes at Bush during a December news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad. Neither shoe hit the president, and other people in the room quickly knocked al-Zaidi to the ground before security officials arrested him.

He explained his actions in an hour-long appearance on Thursday at the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. Asked if anyone pushed or motivated him to do this, al-Zaidi said he was spurred on by the "violations that are committed against the Iraqi people."

"I could only see Bush and feel the blood of the innocents flow under his feet, as he was smiling that smile -- as if he had come to bid farewell to Iraq and with the last support and more than 1 million martyrs," al-Zaidi said. "At that moment, I felt this is the man who killed our nation ... the main murderer and the main person responsible for killing our nation."

"I had no intention to kill the commander of the occupying forces ... even if I had a weapon ... I was expressing my inner feelings and those of all the Iraqi people from east to west and north to south and the feelings of hatred they hold for him," he said.

Al-Zaidi told the judge that he had intended to humiliate Bush in the past. As Bush listed the gains made in Iraq during the mid-December news conference, al-Zaidi said he was thinking about the millions of civilians who had been killed, widowed or displaced. He talked about the sanctity of mosques being violated, the rape of women and daily humiliations.

"I don't know what accomplishments he was talking about. The accomplishments I could see were the more than 1 million martyrs and a sea of blood," al-Zaidi said. "There are more than 5 million Iraqi orphans because of the occupation. ... More than a million widows and more than 3 million displaced because of the occupation."

I can’t help but think that it is unlikely that I would be arrested if I went to one of my local town meetings and threw my shoes at my mayor because I was upset with him. Where is the justice in this world if Muntadher al-Zaidi is punished for a non-crime and Bush is never punished for his many crimes?

Update:
Some people simply refuse to listen to what others have to say if it doesn’t fit their point of view.

Those Activist Judges Have Been Active

The right-wing seem to consider the phrase “activist judge” to be a derogatory phrase. Do they feel the same way when Bush appointees are the ones being active?

From Appeals Courts Pushed to Right by Bush Choices by Charlie Savage:

Republican-appointed judges, most of them conservatives, are projected to make up about 62 percent of the bench next Inauguration Day, up from 50 percent when Mr. Bush took office. They control 10 of the 13 circuits, while judges appointed by Democrats have a dwindling majority on just one circuit.

Appeals courts tend to change the law incrementally rather than in rapid shifts. They are constrained to follow Supreme Court precedent, and most of their work consists of unanimously disposing of routine cases.

Still, every year courts encounter some controversial cases in which they have greater discretion. In such circumstances, several studies have shown that judges appointed by Republican presidents since Reagan have ruled for conservative outcomes more often than have their peers.

They have been more likely than their colleagues to favor corporations over regulators and people alleging discrimination, and to favor government over people who claim rights violations. They have also been more likely to throw out cases on technical grounds, like rejecting plaintiffs’ standing to sue.

It appears that our judicial system has become nearly as fair and balanced as Fox News.

It also seems that conservative judges have some contempt for the law. How weird is that?

The consequences of the evolving judiciary are only beginning to play out.

In the case of the 2005 South Dakota abortion law, the dissenters — including two Democratic appointees, a Reagan appointee, and a Bush appointee — portrayed the court’s decision as a sharp change in direction.

The majority, they contended, had not only bypassed “important principles of constitutional law laid down by the Supreme Court” but also violated the appeals court’s established standards for issuing preliminary injunctions.

Even though Halloween is dead and gone, at least for this year, the land of the judiciary remains a scary place. Especially if you believe in the Constitution, which apparently many conservative judges do not. How weird is that?

From Invasion Of The Constitution Snatchers: Bush Judges Scare The Halloween Out Of Me by Joseph L. Conn:

* Judge William Pryor, U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. A former Alabama attorney general, Pryor went to court to defend notorious Chief Justice Roy Moore’s 2.5-ton Commandments monument in the state judicial building, telling a rally that God had chosen Christians “to save our country and save our courts.”

* Judge Janice Rogers Brown, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Brown says the United States is in a religious battle of Civil War proportions, has questioned whether the Bill of Rights applies to the states and has criticized the Supreme Court for relying on that “rather uninformative metaphor of the ‘wall of separation of church and state.’”

* Judge Michael W. McConnell, U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Described in The New York Times after his nomination as “an important architect of a shift in American law away from strict separation of church and state,” McConnell has expressed support for tax aid to religion, bitterly opposed reproductive rights and called for more religious influence in public schools and public life.

I want my country back. I want our Constitution back. I want our collective sanity back.

Perhaps we never were truly collectively sane, but we seem to have gone further and further off the deep end with each passing day of the last eight years.

Revenge? What About Justice?

Alan M. Dershowitz has written Indictments Are Not The Best Revenge. It appears in the Wall Street Journal. Reading it most definitely caused my blood pressure to rise considerably.

Let’s start with the title Dershowitz chose. Right away he exhibits his bias. Right away he begins to misrepresent reality. Many people want investigations and many people want impeachment (a form of investigation). And yes, some want indictments. This is called justice. You would think that Mr. Dershowitz, a lawyer and a professor of law at Harvard, would know these things. His title implies that indictments are a bad thing, and by inference that justice is a bad thing. Indictments are simply a part of the judicial process. They help us find out if a person committed a crime. A lawyer such as Mr. Dershowitz should know that they have nothing to do with revenge. At least not in the way that they are supposed to be used. Do you use indictments for revenge, Mr. Dershowitz? Is that why you think of them in that way? Indictments Are Not The Best Revenge. This implies that revenge has some sort of way of being classified on a scale from bad to good. Revenge is always bad. It is never good. It is never best.

Shall I move beyond the title to what he actually wrote?

But during a recent campaign rally Mr. Biden gave a wrong-headed, if well-intentioned, answer when asked whether he would "pursue the violations that have been made against our Constitution by the present administration?" This is how he responded: "We will not be stopped from pursuing any criminal offense that's occurred."

After praising Democratically controlled congressional committees for investigating these matters -- "collecting data, subpoenaing records . . . building a file" -- Mr. Biden continued: "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued -- not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, [but] out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president -- no one is above the law."

Dershowitz calls Biden’s answer “wrong-headed.” How can Biden’s answer possibly be called wrong-headed? It sounds perfectly right-headed to me. As in, this is the right thing to be doing. Not to Mr. Dershowitz, however. If you can believe it, here is the Dershowitz reason for why we should not pursue justice:

But there is a countervailing principle at play here that is equally important -- namely that the results of an election should not determine who is to be prosecuted. These principles inevitably clash when the winners of a presidential election investigate and prosecute the losers, even if the winners honestly believe that the losers committed "genuine crimes" rather than having pursued merely "bad policies."

Does that sound totally idiotic to you? It does to me. He says that elections “should not determine who is to be prosecuted.” Yes, that’s true, and it is something that I agree with. That’s the job of the judicial system. Dershowitz then makes a strange jump in logic that makes my head spin. Because an election should not determine who is to be prosecuted, no one should determine who is to be prosecuted. The reason Dershowitz gives for this is basically that it makes Obama and the Democrats look bad. It appears to be “bad form” (as the British would say) or something.

It is hard to tell from what he writes, but it seems to me that Dershowitz is implying that Obama is going to win, or that if McCain should win, that a McCain administration would not pursue any prosecutions. This doesn’t seem like logical thinking by Dershowitz to me. He seems to be making some strange assumptions. If Obama wins, it’s wrong to prosecute. If McCain wins, no one will prosecute. My conclusion from all of this: Bush wins, yet again, and the American people lose, yet again.

So, in spite of Dershowitz saying that elections should not determine who is to be prosecuted, he actually seems to be saying that elections should determine who is to be prosecuted. And who is to be prosecuted according to Dershowitz? No one. Like I said, he makes my head spin. How can I possibly conclude that Dershowitz means the opposite of what he says? Because Dershowitz is basically lying. What he really means is that elections should determine that no one is ever prosecuted.

Let’s make our government smaller. Let’s throw out the Attorney General, let’s throw out the Department of Justice and the Supreme Court. Like Shakespeare said: “Kill all the lawyers.” We don’t need any of it. Elections determine justice! How wrong we have been all these years.

He then goes on and babbles about the function of the attorney general, and what he says seems totally wrong to me. He writes about a conflict of interest because the attorney general “plays two roles simultaneously -- that of political adviser to the president, and that of chief law enforcement officer of the United States.” Maybe bad lawyers like Dershowitz and Alberto Gonzales see it this way. Others think that the attorney general should be above partisanship and place his law enforcement duties above all else. Is Dershowitz even aware of the reason why Gonzales is no longer attorney general? I shudder to think what Dershowitz is teaching his students at Harvard!

Even if Dershowitz is right about the attorney general, it is a separate problem. One that, if Dershowitz is right, should be corrected. However, once again, I believe that Dershowitz is wrong. I don’t think that the attorney general functions as a political adviser to the president, but as an advisor in things pertaining to the law. At least, that’s the way it should be, by definition. In practice, we sometimes get an Alberto Gonzales coupled with an immoral president, and all hell breaks loose. However, none of this has anything to do with the argument that Dershowitz is making. Look at it this way. According to Dershowitz whatever the attorney general does or says doesn’t matter to the argument that Dershowitz is trying to make. The attorney general doesn’t matter, only the election does. In other words, Dershowitz is just blowing smoke.

The real question is whether investigating one's political opponents poses too great a risk of criminalizing policy differences -- especially when these differences are highly emotional and contentious, as they are with regard to Iraq, terrorism and the like. The fear of being criminally prosecuted by one's political adversaries has a chilling effect on creative policy making and implementation.

Bush knows this, Bush did this, and it is one reason that Bush should be prosecuted. Bush and Cheney function by intimidation. I’d welcome some of that “chilling effect.” Directed at Bush and Cheney for once, and not toward the Democrats as Alberto Gonzales so frequently did. If Bush and Cheney feared being criminally prosecuted by their political adversaries we would not be in Iraq right now.

For some reason Dershowitz sees fit to drag Noam Chomsky into all of this. Probably just so he can call him a name. As in “You lefty commie nogoodnik.” Actually, Dershowitz calls him “a sort of guru to hard-left America bashers.” Right. That tired old saw again. If you criticize a right-wing or conservative politician, or policy, you hate America. Give me a break. By this logic Dershowitz is a sort of guru to hard-right America bashers. What does it say psychologically about Dershowitz as a man that he feels he must resort to name calling? He then gives a rather long list of American interventions in other countries that many consider to be criminal. Contrary to what Bush and the right-wing say, this is the reason why “they” hate us. I suppose that, because Dershowitz seems to consider Chomsky to be some kind of lunatic, we can just dismiss all of the legal and moral concerns that many have about everything Dershowitz lists. This is the best that Dershowitz can come up with? An illogical appeal to the right-wing as an argument? I thought that lawyers dealt with facts. More of Dershowitz just blowing smoke. Is this how he won cases when he practiced/practices law?

Then Dershowitz says:

A politically appointed prosecutor, imbued with partisan zeal, could find technical violations of the criminal law in some of the envelope-pushing policies of virtually every administration.

Exactly right! Go for it! Perhaps there is hope for Dershowitz yet. (“Violations of the criminal law” are still violations whether they are found with partisan zeal or not. Are they not?) But, sadly no.

Prosecution should be reserved for the extremely rare situation where the criminal act and mens rea are so apparent to everyone that no reasonable person would suspect partisanship. The best remedy in other cases is to campaign against and defeat those who supported the bad policies.

Well of course! Why didn’t I see it before. Dershowitz is saying that justice for a politician should be the same as it is for the black man in the Baltimore projects. Isn’t that what he is saying? Don’t prosecute that black man for dealing drugs, campaign against him, and vote for the other guy. Problem solved. What’s that you say? Doesn’t that mean that a guilty man goes free? Why, yes. But apparently this is no concern for Dershowitz. (Why the hell is he at Harvard?)

(A disclaimer here: I do not mean to sound racist here. Quite the opposite, in fact. I do not mean to imply that all black men are drug dealers. I do mean to say that our justice system is full of bias. White presidents get pardoned, black men get put into prison.)

If the Bush Administration has not given Dershowitz evidence of the criminal act and mens rea being “so apparent to everyone that no reasonable person would suspect partisanship” then nothing ever will. Justice may be blind, but Dershowitz is deaf, dumb, blind, and brain dead.

That is among the important reasons why I will vote for the Obama-Biden ticket, and that is also why I will try to persuade them, if they win, not to conduct criminal investigations of their defeated opponents.

Meanwhile, for what it’s worth, I’ll be persuading them to do the exact opposite. Dershowitz is so very wrong about all of this. It is not about partisanship, it is about justice and the survival of the United States as a democracy.

What Dershowitz has written reminds me of the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford. The pardon of Nixon and the above mentioned list of American interventions in other countries helped set the stage for the invasion of Iraq and the lack of impeachment of Bush and Cheney. This is not a good place to be, yet Dershowitz just wants more of the same. If we do what Dershowitz suggests, things will only get worse. Imagine that. Worse than the Bush years. What will the death count be for the next illegal war? Makes me shudder in fear.

Allan Dershowitz is one of a dwindling number of Bush apologists. Once there were many. Apologists for Bush got him elected. Apologists for Bush have kept him in power (Yes, I mean you, Nancy Pelosi). Apologists for Bush want to keep him from ever having to face justice.

Biden is right, Dershowitz is wrong. A lawyer should know better. This is not something for one man (Dershowitz) to decide. It is something for our judicial system to decide.

Why, in Allan Dershowitz’s world, does revenge trump justice?

People like Dershowitz make me physically ill.

Update:
At one time Mr. Dershowitz was not brain dead.

A Mockery Of Justice

A tidbit from Justice Kennedy: the Supreme Court's man in the middle by Michael Doyle:

In Boumediene v. Bush, Kennedy's 5-4 opinion extended habeas corpus rights to foreign prisoners seeking to challenge their detention at Guantanamo.

"It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," a vehemently dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia said.

How can Antonin Scalia make such an irresponsible statement? How can a Supreme Court judge be against the rule of law? How can a Supreme Court judge have such little regard for personal liberty? This man is making a mockery of justice, and does not belong on the Supreme Court.

What is habeas corpus?

Britannica.com says it is:

…an ancient common-law writ, issued by a court or judge directing one who holds another in his custody to produce the body of the person before the court for some specified purpose. Although there have been and are many varieties of the writ, the most important is that used to correct violations of personal liberty by directing judicial inquiry into the legality of a detention. The habeas corpus remedy is recognized in the countries of the Anglo-American legal system but is generally not found in civil-law countries, although some of the latter have adopted comparable procedures.

The origins of the writ cannot be stated with certainty. Before the Magna Carta (1215), a variety of writs performed some of the functions of habeas corpus. During the Middle Ages habeas corpus was employed to bring cases from inferior tribunals into the king’s courts. The modern history of the writ as a device for the protection of personal liberty against official authority may be said to date from the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509), when efforts were made to employ it on behalf of persons imprisoned by the Privy Council. By the reign of Charles I, in the 17th century, the writ was fully established as the appropriate process for checking the illegal imprisonment of people by inferior courts or public officials.

Read the rest here.

Without some form of “protection of personal liberty against official authority”, what are we left with? Well, fascism comes to mind.

Here is part of what Britannica.com says about fascism:

Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from each other, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.

I respectfully submit to Antonin Scalia that more Americans will probably be killed BECAUSE of Guantanamo and the LACK of habeas corpus there. I know that if my mother, father, sister, or brother were detained there (with all their rights stripped away) I would be extremely angry at those holding them.

I am also deeply offended and insulted by Scalia’s fear-mongering in service to America’s “extreme militaristic nationalism.” A Supreme Court justice should not be making predictions that are not based on any factual evidence. Especially predictions that support a particular partisan position.

We talk often of the global economy. We need to talk more about global justice.

Antonin Scalia should resign from the Supreme Court. Someone who does not support justice for all does not belong there. Someone who has so little faith in our courts to convict the guilty does not belong there.

Strange Fruit

I try to refrain from calling people names, but Senator Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma is an ass. It seems that he is racist as well. One third of our government is supposed to be devoted to justice and another third to laws. It seems that Senator Coburn does not think that laws and justice are important. At least when they pertain to black people.

From New evidence collected in 1946 lynching case by Doug Gross:

State and federal investigators said Tuesday that they spent the past two days gathering evidence in the last documented mass lynching in the United States: a grisly slaying of four people that has remained unsolved for more than six decades.

Read the rest here.

Six decades? Whatever happened to the swiftness of justice?

This is the part that pertains to Senator Coburn:

Investigations like the one into the Georgia slayings may have gotten another boost in the past week. A U.S. senator agreed to unlock a bill that would create a "cold case unit" at the U.S. Justice Department.

The legislation is sponsored by Democratic U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and passed 422-2 in the House. But Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, used an obscure Senate rule to freeze the bill, just as he routinely does on efforts that require government spending.

The plan would authorize $10 million a year for the next 10 years for the Justice Department to create a unit prosecuting pre-1970 civil rights cases. Another $3.5 million would go annually toward the department's cooperative efforts with local law enforcement.

But last week, a spokesman said Coburn would lift the hold in exchange for a vote on cutting Justice Department spending in other areas.

In what is essentially blackmail, Senator Coburn seems to think that it is completely ethical to exchange some justice here for some justice there. How does this help the cause of justice?

Why was Senator Coburn trying to freeze a bill that would help to give us the truth? The cost of the truth should be worth a few tax dollars. If we can spend countless billions on the war in Iraq, can’t we spend ten million a year for the next 10 years to help the United States try to heal from slavery, lynching, forced black labor after the Emancipation Proclamation, and other forms of racism? To his credit Coburn has voted against funding the war, a war he initially supported.

Time is an important factor here, as some of the people involved in pre-1970 civil rights cases are still alive. Did Coburn want to wait until they had all died off?

With Barack Obama running for president we are at a remarkable point in our history. I do not share the fear that some have of an African-American president. I do not sense that Barack Obama wants to punish white people; I sense that he wants to help us heal and move forward. Along with people like Douglas A. Blackmon, the author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Barack Obama and all the rest of us have an opportunity for a little healing to take place.

From Douglas Blackmon’s blog:

The discussions I've been had over the weeks since the book appeared have been powerful and moving. And with all due respect, they have forcefully contradicted the assertions of a few readers and posters on this blog that it is a mistake to bring forth these terrible aspects of our past.

The reality is that again and again I have experienced marvelously honest conversations in which African-Americans often appeared slightly astonished that whites in the room were able to discuss this past without defensiveness or anger, and in which whites found it remarkable that their black counterparts weren't hammering them with historic crimes, but expressing thanks that it was finally being honestly discussed.

All of these things convince me that America has arrived at a remarkable moment, when a frank and full accounting of the past is possible for the first time, without the recriminations and denial that have characterized so much of our national discourse on race in the past. It has been thrilling to see that conversation unfold in so many venues over the past two months. Thank you all for being part of it.

It seems to me that Senator Coburn is not too enthusiastic for this healing to take place. It seems to me that Senator Coburn does not believe that “the truth shall set us free.”

How can you put a price on justice, Senator Coburn?