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01.13 Hawaii, the Unique State Books, Films, Arts & Education
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02.10 LET’S REMAKE THE WAY WE MAKE THINGS 02.09 Cancer rates triple among New York police officers who responded to 9/11 02.08 The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy 02.07 Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering 02.04 Your Day at the Beach Could Soon Lead to a Night at the Hospital 02.03 Obama Won't Touch Climate With a 10-Foot Pole 02.03 Komen reverses decision to cut Planned Parenthood funding 02.03 Reforming EU Deep-Sea Fisheries Management 02.02 By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women 02.02 Ohio Tries to Escape Fate as a Dumping Ground for Fracking Fluid 01.31 Eleanor Smeal dissects Obama vs. Catholic Church controversy over birth control coverage - video 01.30 Scientists Call on Obama Administration to Use Science as Guide for Arctic 01.28 Universal health care proposal stalls in California Senate 01.27 Apple, Electronics and Environmental Ills 01.25 Solar Cheaper Than Diesel Making India’s Mittal Believer: Energy 01.24 Sounding an Alarm on Birds and Mercury 01.24 Why Don’t We Have Abundant Solar Power? Blame Financing, and Industry, not Science 01.22 The Money Traps in U.S. Health Care 01.22 Looking Inside the Twinkie Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here) Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries “News” Media
02.07 Did Obama make the economy worse? Not according to most statistics 02.02 ABC's Iran Propaganda 02.02 The Ongoing “Foxification” of the Wall Street Journal 01.30 While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower 01.29 Fox News psychiatrist: Newt Gingrich's affairs 'mean he might make a strong president' 01.22 ‘Shocking victory’: With SOPA shelved, Markos Moulitsas on a way forward for Internet policy - video Daily The Daily Howler Justice Matters
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02.10 The Cancer in Occupy 02.10 How Opus Dei Influenced Rick Santorum 02.10 People Are Not Leaving the Labor Force 02.09 Obama, Explained 02.09 OPED: The White Underclass 02.09 EDITORIAL: A Terrible Transportation Bill 02.09 THE OBAMA MEMOS 02.06 Are Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals? 02.04 Soaking the Poor, State by State 02.04 Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics 02.03 SUPERBOWL XLVI: Are You Ready for Some Football??? 02.03 Buffett rules: Sheldon Whitehouse introduces the Paying a Fair Share Act - video 02.02 Secrecy Shrouds ‘Super PAC’ Funds in Latest Filings 02.01 Rich Patrons Are Major Source of Romney’s Cash 01.31 How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress 01.30 Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable 01.30 Clashes in Oakland: 400 Arrests, Tear Gas, Flash-Bang Grenades 01.30 A European look at the US primaries - video 01.29 Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton 01.25 Inside Romney’s Tax Returns: A Reading Guide 01.24 ILLUSIONS: Being Led Down the Primrose Path...??? 01.24 Science Bulletins: Whales Give Dolphins a Lift - video 01.24 THE OBAMA MEMOS 01.22 Three Takeaways From South Carolina High Crimes?
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A NATION OF LAWS BECOMES A NATION THAT COVERS-UP:ACLU Blasts Obama on Bush's CrimesDecember 12, 2009Despite Barack Obama’s high-minded words about “just wars” and human rights – most recently in his Nobel Peace Prize speech – the U.S. President has shielded officials from George W. Bush’s administration from accountability for torture and other war crimes, prompting stern rebukes from leading advocates of civil liberties. Shortly after his speech in Oslo on Thursday, Obama came under withering criticism over his administration’s refusal to comply with legal obligations that require all countries to prosecute their government officials implicated in torture.
Before leaving office, Vice President Dick Cheney said he approved the near drowning of waterboarding on at least three “high value” detainees and the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 other prisoners. Bush made a vaguer acknowledgement of authorizing these techniques. The ACLU and other civil rights groups said Bush and Cheney’s comments amounted to an admission of war crimes. Under the Convention Against Torture, the evidence that the Bush administration used waterboarding and other brutal techniques to extract information from detainees should have triggered the United States to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders. If the United States refused, other nations would be obligated to act under the principle of universality. However, instead of living up to that treaty commitment, the Obama administration is resisting calls for government investigations and going to court to block lawsuits that demand release of torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture. Protecting Yoo
Last week, Obama’s Justice Department asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco to dismiss a lawsuit filed against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who authored some of the memos that justified torture largely by re-defining what the term means. In seeking to quash that lawsuit filed by alleged “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla, Obama’s lawyers argued, in a friend-of-the-court brief that Justice Department lawyers who advise on torture and other human rights issues are entitled to absolute immunity from lawsuits. “The Holder Justice Department insists that they [the lawyers] are absolutely not responsible, and that they are free to act according to a far lower standard of conduct than that which governs Americans generally,” wrote Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and constitutional expert in a report published on Harper’s Web site. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley went even further, asserting that the Obama administration’s arguments reversed more than six decades of U.S. legal precedents – dating back to the post-World War II Nuremberg trials – which held that legal wordsmiths who clear the way for war crimes share the guilt with the actual perpetrators. The Obama administration "has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions," Turley said. "Quite a legacy for the world’s newest Nobel Peace Prize winner." The Obama administration also has mounted an aggressive defense in another high-profile case regarding the Bush administration’s wrongdoing. The Bush administration had invoked the state secrets privilege in a 2007 lawsuit filed against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, that is accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were tortured. Bush’s legal move was successful in getting the case tossed out, but the ACLU appealed the decision. When that appeal came up last February, Obama’s Justice Department shocked civil liberties and human rights advocates by dispatching attorneys to federal court in San Francisco, where they invoked the same state secrets privilege. Even the judge was baffled, and asked a Justice Department attorney if the change in U.S. government leadership would lead to a change in the legal position with regard to state secrets. The answer was a resounding “no.” Still, the appellate court ruled in April that the case could move forward, asserting that state secrets can only be cited with regard to specific evidence, and not used as a means to dismiss an entire lawsuit. Justice Department attorneys will be back in court next week to appeal that decision, carrying forward the Bush administration’s legacy of secrecy. Concealing Evidence
The Obama administration also has tried to block Binyam Mohamed, one of the victims named in Jeppesen lawsuit, from obtaining documentary evidence to support his claims that he was tortured while in U.S. custody. Terrorism-related charges against Mohamed were dropped last year when his attorneys sued to gain access to more than three dozen secret documents. He was released in February after being imprisoned for seven years and sent back to Great Britain. In a legal brief, the ACLU said Mohamed was beaten so severely on numerous occasions that he routinely lost consciousness and during one gruesome torture session “a scalpel was used to make incisions all over his body, including his penis, after which a hot stinging liquid was poured into his open wounds.” Obama’s determination to protect these dirty secrets of its predecessors even reached across the Atlantic. The Obama administration told British officials that intelligence sharing between the U.S. and the U.K. might be disrupted if seven redacted paragraphs contained in secret U.S. documents relating to Mohamed’s torture allegations were made public by a British High Court. Those threats were conveyed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the CIA, and Obama’s National Security Adviser James Jones, according to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. “The United States Government's position is that, if the redacted paragraphs are made public, then the United States will re-evaluate its intelligence-sharing relationship with the United Kingdom with the real risk that it would reduce the intelligence it provided,” the High Court wrote in a ruling in February when it agreed to keep the paragraphs blacked out.
After the High Court’s ruling, the Obama White House issued a statement thanking the British government “for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information” and added that the order would "preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens.” Following the High Court’s reversal, the New York Times published a sharply worded editorial criticizing the Obama administration’s hard-line position in the Mohamed case. “The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up,” the Times wrote. Torture Photos
Obama also reversed a commitment earlier this year to release photos of U.S. soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama said his decision stemmed from his personal review of the photos and his concern that their release would endanger American soldiers in the field, but the reversal also came after several weeks of Republican and right-wing media attacks on him as weak on national security. The Obama administration then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a federal court order requiring release of the images, and Obama’s aides worked with Congress to pass legislation giving the Defense Secretary the power to keep the photographs under wraps. The legislation passed in November and was promptly signed by Obama. By blocking release of the photographs, Obama essentially killed any meaningful chance of opening the door to an investigation or independent inquiry of senior Pentagon and Bush administration officials who implemented the policies that led to the abuses captured in the images. In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, the ACLU also questioned the value of Obama’s much-touted executive order – signed on his second day in office – demanding a shift away from excessive secrecy toward a presumption in favor of open government.
Those documents include ones related to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and transcripts of Combatant Status Review Tribunals where detainees “describe the abuse they suffered at the hands of their CIA interrogators.” However, the ACLU’s Freedom of Information lawsuit continues to unearth bits of new evidence. For instance, the ACLU obtained hundreds of new documents, including a one-page questionnaire apparently from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA.
Other newly disclosed documents show that the Bush White House was deeply involved in discussions about destroying 92 torture videotapes. Investigations Needed
Perhaps, Obama’s most positive act on behalf of open government came in April when he resisted pressure from the CIA and ordered the release of legal memorandums written by lawyers in Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, including Yoo and two former OLC chiefs, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury. The memos used creative definitions regarding torture to authorize the CIA to apply a variety of torture techniques to so-called “high-value” prisoners, including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, placing insects inside a confinement box to induce fear, exposing naked detainees to extreme heat and cold, and shackling prisoners to the ceilings of their prison cells or in other painful “stress positions.” In the face of this evidence, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and his counterpart in the House, John Conyers, floated competing proposals early in the year for a 9/11-style “truth commission” or a blue-ribbon investigative panel to look into the circumstances that led the Bush administration to create its policy of torture. Obama signaled that he was open to the idea of a “truth commission” but he said he was concerned "about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations." After Republicans and neoconservative opinion writers went on the attack, Obama quickly retreated, calling lawmakers to the White House for a closed-door meeting in late April to talk them out of the idea of moving forward with independent investigations or even oversight hearings into the Bush administration’s use of torture. Underscoring Obama’s concerns about a high-profile investigation, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at the time: "the President determined the concept didn't seem altogether workable in this case." Gibbs added, "The last few days might be evidence of why something like this might just become a political back and forth.” Hoping for bipartisanship on pressing issues like the economy and health care, Democrats scuttled the investigative plans. However, Republicans have shown no reciprocal interest in bipartisanship, voting as a virtual bloc against every significant bill that Obama and the Democrats have proposed. Despite Obama’s insistence of “looking forward, not backward,” there remains a chance that hearings on Bush’s torture practices might still be held next year. Leahy and Conyers have indicated they intend to hold hearings next year once a long-awaited report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is released that delves into Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury’s legal work surrounding torture, according to Christopher Anders, the ACLU’s senior legislative counsel. Leahy and Conyers “said a number of times that they would have hearings when the OPR report comes out,” Anders said in an interview. “It would be a big surprise if they didn’t conduct hearings. We fully expect them to hold hearings.” Spokespeople for Conyers and Leahy did not return calls or respond to e-mails seeking comment. Talking to Oslo
Despite Obama’s spotty record on the war crimes that grew out of the Bush’s “war on terror,” the President still focused his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on the altruism of U.S. foreign policy and America’s “moral and strategic interest” in abiding by a humanitarian code of conduct when waging war, even against a “vicious adversary that abides by no rules.” Obama’s criticism of Bush’s behavior was implicit, but not direct.
To many human rights advocates, however, Obama’s noble words rang hollow, especially given fresh reports that his administration continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan where detainees allegedly have been tortured and where the International Committee for the Red Cross has been denied access to some prisoners.
![]() Jason Leopold has launched his own Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org. This article is republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author. Copyright © 2009 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own. This story was published on December 12, 2009. |
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