While the lawmakers and the media are tiptoeing around the torture memos and debating whom they implicate, cartoonist Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle evokes images of Abu Ghraib to point to the real torturers.
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Does anybody who has been watching/reading the news more carefully than I have lately know if there's any serious talk about impeaching Jay Bybee?
Just curious. With the most recent release of torture memos, I'm sure there's increased chatter regarding the possibility that John Yoo — and, a fortiori, Jay Bybee — is a war criminal.
And actually, double bleg: if there is talk about impeaching Bybee, is anyone aware of doubts being raised as to whether he can be impeached?
I'm curious about this last one because Bybee is a federal judge, which means that Article III of the U.S. Constitution gives him life tenure "during good behavior." Compare the President, who is removable under Article II for "high crimes and misdemeanors." My knee-jerk reaction to the text is to say that this is a relevantly different standard. Committing war crimes would surely be a high crime or misdemeanor, and indeed, "good behavior" sets the bar lower here. Behave badly and the Congress can remove you. But the word "during" suggests a temporal element, so that you must behave badly while a federal judge. If I'm right, Judge Bybee can't (constitutionally) be removed because he committed war crimes while a DOJ lawyer — he would actually have to be tried and convicted, in which case he wouldn't be able to fulfill his judicial responsibilities.
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CotL #89 is up at Johnny Pez's blog.
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The story of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by the Bush-Cheney administration is now unfolding in strange and unexpected ways. Just until last Sunday, President Obama and his spokespersons, even while they made the torture memos public, insisted that no prosecution of the planners and the executors was on the horizon. Suddenly, just in the past two days, the position of the Obama administration has changed to "if not prosecution, at least a probe" of the matter is warranted.
Reversing weeks of White House resistance to the idea, President Barack Obama said Tuesday he’s open to creating a blue-ribbon panel to investigate Bush administration excesses during the war on terror.
“If and when there needs to be a fuller accounting of what took place during this period, I think for Congress to examine ways that it can be done in a bipartisan fashion, outside of the typical hearing process that can sometimes break down and break entirely along party lines, … that would probably be a more sensible approach to take,” Obama said during an Oval Office press availability with King Abdullah of Jordan.
Obama stopped short of endorsing the “truth commission” idea, which has been advanced in recent months by Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) However, his comments were markedly more positive toward the idea than those of White House aides, who have repeatedly brushed aside the suggestion.
Obama's reluctant hand may have been forced by lawmakers like Sen Diane Feinstein asking for further scrutiny of the torture methods and others like Sen Patrick Leahy and Congressman John Conyers demanding the impeachment of Judge Jay Baybee who as a DOJ lawyer under Bush authored a memo endorsing those methods.
The really odd thing in all this is the behavior of former vice president Dick Cheney. While all other Bush operatives have been silent, Cheney has defiantly defended the illegalities that took place during his tenure. He has even implied that the Obama administration's reluctance to participate in similar extra-Constitutional activities may endanger the security of the US. In a stunning move, the normally secretive Cheney demanded that the CIA make public more information about torture in order to prove to the American public that techniques like waterboarding of suspected terrorists kept the country safe. But others have suggested that the former veep may have more mercenary motives in wishing to see the secret files de-classified. He is writing a memoir and would like to use the information to brag about his muscular machismo.
Researching his memoirs, former Vice President Dick Cheney is pushing the CIA to declassify files that he claims would vindicate the CIA’s use of coercive interrogation techniques that President Barack Obama has banned.
The request, which the CIA has not yet answered, sets up a showdown between the past and current administrations. Cheney can be expected to argue that the Obama administration's publication of other files last week is a precedent for release of the reports he wants. Cheney contends that the information he seeks does not pose a threat to anyone, nor to intelligence sources and methods.
Cheney originally requested the reports in late March as he worked on his book, but now thinks the documents should be made public immediately as evidence that waterboarding and other controversial practices deterred terrorist attacks and therefore saved American lives.
The CIA declined to comment on Cheney's request. Other officials say a demand like Cheney's is so legally complex that it’s unsurprising the government has not yet answered him.
The president asserts that the techniques amounted to unwise and immoral torture, and has set out to show the world that he will take a different approach. Disavowing the memos during a visit to CIA headquarters on Monday, Obama said in public remarks to the Langley workforce: “I believe that our nation is stronger and more secure when we deploy the full measure of both our power and the power of our values –- including the rule of law.”
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I don't believe anyone here at Accidental Blogger has yet mentioned the strip-search case currently pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. A school strip searched a 13 year old girl; the legal question is whether that violated her constitutional rights, which disturbingly is not an easy question. One of her classmates had gotten caught taking a pill at school, and said she got the pill from her. The school had a zero tolerance policy or something.
Here's the most shocking aspect of this to me: the strip search was conducted because of the suspicion that the girl had provided another student with prescription-strength ibuprofen. That's a double dose of Advil! Forget the constitutional-law aspect of this — what type of school administrator orders a strip search in order to catch a girl with ibuprofen?
Second most shocking aspect of this: at oral arguments, the lawyer for the school district told Justice Scalia that yes, the Constitution would allow even a body-cavity search. Not that anyone would ever do that. But Scalia's not allowed to stop them.
UPDATE: Apparently, at oral arguments Justice Breyer raised the point that people stuck things in his underwear when he was in school.
“So what am I supposed to do? In my experience when I
was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once
a day, we changed for gym, okay? And in my experience, too, people did
sometimes stick things in my underwear.”He stopped in his tracks as the entire courtroom dissolved into laughter. Then he attempted to dig himself out:
“Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don’t know.”
Which explains why the vice principal would think a strip search was appropriate? I'm not really sure where he was going with this one.
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After all the world-wide interest in Susan Boyle, there are still some things about the phenomenon which are rather puzzling to me. On seeing the Youtube video for the first time, I was struck by how exaggerated the judges' and audience's eye-rolling and snickering seemed to b
e. Why should they react thus at the sight of Susan Boyle, who looked like a perfectly ordinary lady you might run into on the street, quite literally, if you were paying more attention to your cellphone than who was in front of you. Her speaking voice and dialect were a little hard to follow, but once she started to sing, barely two lines into the song, the amazing roar of approval, clapping, widened eyes and judge reactions seemed a tad bit too pat. Cue the artifice, the unseen signs prompting the audience to 'Stand up and clap'.
Her voice is amazing and true, and like other feel-good stories, says to the average underdog "Yes, we can…win over the world with the secret talents we unleash upon it." It's the stuff of childhood dreams, when soot-covered Cinderella is removed from her ash-filled corner, ensconced in a beautiful gown, parading in triumph in her glittering carriage. Only, in this case, the focus is on the fact that even a pretty dress and getup will not change the fact that Susan Boyle's face was pegged as ordinary, even ugly, by today's societal (or media-driven?) standards of 'beauty'.
From the Wikipedia link:Tanya Gold wrote in The Guardian that the difference between Boyle's hostile reception and the more neutral response to Paul Potts in his first audition reflected society's expectation that women be both good-looking and talented, with no such expectation existing for men. In a similar vein, a columnist on Salon.com wrote that Boyle's performance reminded people that "not all fortysomething women are sleek, Botoxed beauties", going on to say that Boyle's sudden fame came from her ability to remind her audience that, like them, she is a normal, flawed and vulnerable person, familiar with disappointment and mockery, but who nevertheless has the determination to fight for her dream.
Several media sources have commented that Boyle's success seemed to have particular resonance in the United States. Writing in The Scottsman Craig Brown quoted a U.S. entertainment correspondent who compared Boyle's story to the American Dream, in that it represented talent overcoming adversity and poverty. The Associated Press described this as Boyle's "hardscrabble story", dwelling on her modest lifestyle and what they saw as urban deprivation in her home town., The Independent New York correspondent David Usborne wrote that America is a country that will always respond to "the fairy tale where the apparently unprepossessing suddenly becomes pretty, from Shrek to My Fair Lady". Piers Morgan, one of the show's judges, also commented on the unusual power this story seemed to have in the U.S., stating that "Americans can be very moved by this sort of thing." He likened Boyle's rise to fame from poverty and obscurity to that of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, who was the subject of a series of Hollywood films.
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A meteoric rise to fame, fuelled by the technology of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter, as well as major exploding coverage on the network and cable channels. It's hard to believe that this was a reflection of something that happened in January 2009, followed by months of careful editing and virality being unleashed around April 11, 2009.
Talent notwithstanding, the media is unleashing reams of commentary along the lines of "Looks aren't everything, talent is." and "Isn't it amazing how wonderful her voice is, despite her looks and those terrible beetling eyebrows?", "Will she or won't she have a makeover?"
I will confess that I'm amazed by all this silly pontification (Kindly ignore the fact that I'm indulging in it here, as well). Doesn't day-to-day life teach all these millions of people that talent can be wrapped in unlikely packages? Don't they know of mailcarriers or janitors or unprepossessing matrons who share their secret talents with the small circle of friends, untrammeled by the spotlight and glare of airbrushed magazine covers and HDTV?
I seriously doubt it. This is just a temporary phenomenon, even with the huge numbers involved. Tomorrow everyone will be chasing after the next viral thing to hit the internet. But for now, Susan Boyle has achieved her dream, and given fuel to a few million other dreams as well.
(Cross posted from Fluff-n-Stuff)
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Want your book to shoot up on the bestsellers list? A sure fire way is to have a celebrity or an enemy endorse it. The much maligned Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is one such enemy who has helped with the brisk sales of at least two books by promoting them at world venues. The first time, Chavez helped propel Noam Chomsky's “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” to Amazon's Top Ten list in 2006 by brandishing it during a speech at the UN. Now he has done the same favor to an obscure book of Latin American history by making a public gift of it to President Obama at last week's Summit of the Americas. The last time I checked, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" was # 2 on Amazon.
(Could we get Hugo to mention our blog in public?)
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In case you haven't watched today's news, here are the "torture memos" issued by Bush-Cheney's Justice Department which enabled the top administration bosses and their underlings in the CIA to carry out illegal torture tactics on prisoners. War criminals like Dick Cheney still justify their actions with impunity. Why should he worry? The weak-kneed Obama administration, even while making the memos public, has made it clear that it intends to paper over the lawlessness of its predecessors for the sake of moving forward.
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Why become a pirate? Perhaps because other "honest" means of livelihood have been destroyed? Lawlessness is a menace whether perpetrated by pirates or "civilized" governments. So reveals Johann Hari in the Independent. (via 3 QD) Hari also reflects on the rebellious and brutal history of pirates, some of whom were mercenaries for legitimate European regimes.
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.
The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
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Texas governor Rick "Good Hair" Perry's latest political stunt.
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I didn't know grown men play make-believe pirate games. Apparently, it is a popular pastime for some who are beguiled by the tales of high jinks on high seas popularized in books, theme parks and movies. Those daredevil outlaws of the past occupy a romanticized place in the hearts of some modern day men with sedate lives. In their spare time, they like to put on eye patches, dress up in tight pants, fancy hats, assume flamboyant names and play at being swashbuckling buccaneers. But the recent real life crack down on scruffy Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean who prey on merchant ships that has shone the light on the unglamorous aspects of piracy may have put a damper on the playful spirits of the fantasy pirates on land.
America’s pirate subculture is a peculiar world where grown men strap on eye patches, sing pirate chanteys and take on names like, in Clayton Jackson’s case, Morick Towain.
Once a month, Jackson dresses up in pirate garb — such as a head wrap, pair of pointy boots and special piratey pants. Then he hits the bars for some drinks with a few similarly dressed friends.
“Being a pirate is about freedom, it’s the lifestyle of that old-time period that catches my attention,” said Jackson of Dallas, who runs a social group for Texas pirates. Spurred by popular movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, interest in pirates of centuries past has skyrocketed in recent years.
But the recent worldwide furor over real-life Somali pirates raises a pressing question: Should people really be romanticizing murderous pirates — even old ones?
In the tightknit pirate subculture, the issue is a touchy subject and rarely discussed. Leaders of the movement say they’ve recently begun fielding more pointed, occasionally uncomfortable questions.
“If we had been thinking ahead we would have called it `Talk Like a Buccaneer Day,' ” said John Baur, speaking of the now famous Talk Like a Pirate Day he co-founded with friend Mark Summers in 1995.
Summers became so concerned with the issue of modern-day piracy, he recently wrote an open letter to the Somali pirates in a trade magazine.
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Knitting is among the few things that I do reasonably well. While I don't particularly enjoy stitching or embroidery, I have always been fond of knitting since my mother taught me the skill around the time I was five or six years old. I must have made close to a hundred garments and accessories during my life. I have knitted for myself, my family, my friends and their kids. For the last several years however, my needles have clicked mainly for charity, focusing on easy to finish items like children's hats, scarves, mittens and cardigans donated to my neighbors' churches for their annual bazaars and overseas care packages.
Two winters ago, having come across a nice design in a pattern book, I took on a more elaborate project – an adult sized sweater for my son. Having duly obtained an excellent yarn I started enthusiastically. The initial tempo was brisk but things soon fell by the wayside, mostly because of my furious rate of blogging during that period. In fact, I often went for months without returning to the sweater. When I would go back to it, it took me a while to figure out exactly where I was and it was dispiriting to gauge the dismal rate of progress. Normally, a pullover of this size and complexity would have taken me no more than three months to finish at a leisurely but steady pace. This one dragged on for two years – all because of my preoccupation with the blog. A couple of months ago, after Barack Obama became president, I decided to let up a bit on blogging and concentrate instead on the never-ending sweater. Noting my uncharacteristic silence in the blogosphere, the always interesting Elatia Harris of 3 Quarks Daily wrote in an email:
"Still in the blog doldrums? You did say you were knitting. I hope that doesn't mean endorphin mutiny."
I knew right away that I must bring the expression, "endorphin mutiny" to the attention of my readers somewhere, somehow. Although it is true that knitting helps keep one from climbing the wall during stressful times, I assured her that this particular effort was a non-therapeutic project and that I intended to finish the job before Houston heat makes knitting an itchy pastime. Well, the sweater was at last finished and put together about ten days ago. I took a few pictures of my handiwork and am displaying them here as evidence of "mission accomplished." Sadly though, I discovered that a charcoal colored sweater does not photograph well – the pattern does not show up at all in the photos. But here it is anyway - the sweater I sweated over.
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It might not be a "real" holiday, but still. "This is the first legitimately nice thing to happen to [the] legal profession in 2009."
Indeed. Especially when firms are leading the pack in innovation by finding new and improved (read: more efficient, more brutal) ways to take flamethrowers to associates.
Accidental Blogger 