Dis-Honoris Causa

Jun 16, 2007 | Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Legal, Media Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Dis-Honoris Causa

 

In all its splendor and majesty

In September 2006 the US right pushed the country “a step toward totalitarianism” when the Republican Senate majority passed a bill which essentially stripped the US Constitution of the protection of habeas corpus, one of the foundational guarantees against executive injustice and abuse of power which has been an essential part the British legal tradition for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Garrison Keillor said at the time:

“  Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

[…]

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators….[T]hey have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

[…]

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[…]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: ‘Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.’

 

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

 

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

There were 65 Senators who voted in favour of the stripping of habeas corpus.

Three of them are now Republican Presidential candidates (none are Democrat candidates).

They were Brownback, Hagel and McCain. None of them now, as Keillor says, “has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.”

Indeed, such “wretched figures” surely agree with the American military that the question of whether the Guantánamo prisoners – whose Military Tribunal cases were recently dismissed – were “Enemy Combatants” or “Illegal Enemy Combatants” is mere semantics. Of course. It is merely the law, and — as we know from the way that John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Andrew Card, George Bush and Dick Cheney (not to mention McCain, Brownback and Hagel) view the law in general — when it gets in the way of their own agenda the rule of law and basic democratic principles are of small importance and the law itself (even though passed by the same vile and obsequious Senate) merely a minor hindrance when it comes to the Machtergreifung ¹.

But the law is not nothing, and the difference between an “illegal” and an ordinary “enemy combatant” is neither trivial nor semantic, as “rmj” clearly explains at Adventus [and also here].

(These are the people and the sort of people, by the way, whom John Howard’s government – especially Billy Bunter Downer, Darth Ruddock and the man who has lost any idea of morality or democratic principles, Michael Joseph Keelty – uses as its moral, legal and ethical benchmarks.)

Garrison Keillor went on to say, “Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.”

So, speaking of universities granting honorary degrees to dishonourable people…

One-time Acting-Attorney-General James Comey “testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal…In early January 2006, the New York Times…reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time…After Comey’s refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program”.

(Ashcroft refused. See Comey’s description here).

Nevertheless, about three weeks ago, “Andy” Card got his reward from – to its eternal shame and disgrace – the University of Massachusetts. But not without the almost universal condemnation of students and faculty in perhaps the most astonishing display of opposition and dissent ever, certainly recently, in a formal academic ritual.

[See the video above]

 

 

¹ “Machtergreifung is a German word meaning “seizure of power”. It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933.

The term Machtergreifung was first coined by the Nazis themselves in order to portray their accession to power as an active seizure”

Spelling It Out

Apr 30, 2007 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Spelling It Out

 

Okay, no surprise…

The Bush White House lied to the American people.

…Except that one of the people who knew it at the time, a US Senator, has dropped a “Bombshell on the Senate Floor”.

So here it is at last. Not the smoking gun we had before but the political mushroom cloud which should explode George Bush’s presidency and John Howard’s career. Should…but…you know…

US Senator Dick Durbin, who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the lead up to the Iraq war, explained the truth of what was actually going on behind the scenes in top secret intelligence briefings in 2002-2003 and how it compared with what the White House was spruiking publicly.

Durbin and his fellow committee members knew that George Bush and his administration were intentionally misleading the world but they couldn’t say anything:

Excerpt from Durbin’s statement:

“  The Intelligence Committee was meeting on a daily basis for top-secret briefings about the information we were receiving and the information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it.

Members of this administration were in active, heated debate over whether Aluminum tubes really meant that the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons, some within the administration were saying, “Of course not. It’s not the same kind of aluminum tube,” at the same time that members of the administration were telling the American people to be fearful of mushroom-shaped clouds.

But unfortunately, as a member of the Committee, he was sworn to secrecy.

“  We can’t walk outside the door and say, “The statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that’s been given to this Congress…

And so in my frustration I sat here on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate about invading Iraq, thinking, “The American people are being misled. They’re not being told the truth.”

Who also knew what Senator Durbin and his colleagues knew?

The President, George W. Bush.

The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice had to know.

Cheney. Rove. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. Feith. Chalabi.

Obviously the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had to know. What sort of a “man” will intentionally and knowingly lie, not just to his own country but to the entire world, knowing that the lies he tells will certainly lead to the premeditated, and unjustified, deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings? How does such a “man” choose to do that? How does such a “man” live with himself?

And then there are Tony Blair and John Howard. They must have been told the truth. After all, they are the United States’ most respected allies and George Bush’s best friends. He would not have lied his best mates into such a war.

So Howard knew there was no substance to – or at the very least, serious disagreement about – the so-called “evidence” which he used to take Australia to war (against the wishes of the people, by the way). Blair and Campbell even sexed up and fabricated evidence because even the lies weren’t convincing enough.

If Howard knew the truth he was murderously reckless with other people’s – and other people’s children’s – lives.

If Howard was told the truth he has no respect for, belief in, or sense of responsibility to the Australian people.

Or if Howard did not know the truth then the only alternative is that he is a gullible fool who credulously bought a pack of lies.

If Howard was not told the truth the so-called close and special relationship between the USA and Australia is a sham and an embarrassment.

If Howard was not told the truth the USA has no respect for Australia, and the alliance has no value.

If Howard was not told the truth he is a shocking judge of character with an appalling choice of friends.

A person who tells such lies to his country is a traitor and a criminal.
A person who premeditates the deaths of innocent others is a murderer.
A person who lies to commit premeditated slaughter on this scale is not just a mass-murderer. He is a criminal psychopath.

Sadly, although I believe this statement by Senator Durbin is explosive – because it blows away the last remnants of Bush/Blair/Howard’s pretence – I don’t expect to see it repeated on Page One in the mainstream media. But I would love to hear how the usual suspects play it down and excuse it. Let me guess.

“It’s old news.”

“I think the Australian public has moved past that.”

“How we got there is no longer the issue. What’s important is what we do now.”

Swallowing Bullshit Whole

Apr 27, 2007 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, Media Values, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Swallowing Bullshit Whole

Buying the War – Bill Moyers

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong about Iraq?

 

This may be the most “important” video you will see this year.
It’s a special program from Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

Buying the War is a careful, thorough, chilling expose of how the American, and in fact almost the entire Western, mainstream media lost their scepticism, their perspective and their judgment along with all their highly-trained journalistic principles, swallowed whole the Bush administration’s predigested Iraq scam and palmed it off onto a gullible, frightened and sometimes hysterical public.

It is particularly urgent because the men who took us there are still in power and still in denial, still refusing to admit they made a mistake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – in stark contrast to the almost total lack of factual evidence which could support the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in the first place.

John Howard stakes his career and his credibility on the assertion that he made a wise and well-informed decision. How excited he was that Australia had been part of providing solid evidence – the aluminium tubes, remember? – of Iraq’s nuclear program. Except they weren’t for a nuclear anything. He has never apologised for that. Never admitted it was a mistake. He will never apologise to the families (what is left of them) of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose death he is by collusion responsible for, or the 2 million Iraqi refugees, or the 2 million Iraqis internally displaced. Or to the thousands of coalition soldiers and civilians killed and maimed in Iraq.

But he made a big, big mistake.

Either he was a willing co-conspirator in the Iraq catastrophe or he was duped. In either case that is not good enough to be Prime Minister of Australia.

The same is true of John Howard’s echo-chamber, the right-wing commentariat of people like Albrechtsen, Ackerman, Bolt, Devine all the other friends of Rupert – apologists for the Groveller General who nevertheless will never (like him) apologise for the egregious errors of judgment and fact that they have made and propagated for so long.

[One of the arguments given by those who supported the war, including Howard and his sycophantic media cheer-squad, and current US Presidential candidates like Clinton, is that “everyone believed Iraq did have WMDs”. That is not true.

Values Australia didn’t believe it for a minute, not just because we are a government-certified political clairvoyant but because we studied the political context, we looked at the so-called evidence and the way it was presented, the people who were presenting it and their probable motives, along with the evidence against it and the credibility of the people who presented that.

Values Australia was not alone. Millions of people around the world agreed. The difference is that these people are not afraid of the US Administration, or Murdoch, or the electorate. The difference is that we did not think the deaths of others and the carnage which we predicted would be a fair price for others to pay to protect our careers.

Moyers talks to the most senior journalists, including those who bought the Administration’s line, like Dan Rather, and those who didn’t, like Knight Ridder and those who claim to be pawns, like Tim Russert.

He shows how the propaganda was manufactured. For example, the White House needed to “prove” that Saddam Hussein had an atomic weapons program. There were those intercepted aluminium tubes, but that was top, top secret. Even Cheney couldn’t talk about them. So what he did was to leak the story to the New York Times who, of course, published it and Cheney was then able to comment on the story the next day on Meet the Press with Tim Russert.

“    It is now public that he has been seeking to acquire … the kinds of tubes that are necessary … in order to build a bomb.”

The guy has balls. But they’re huge bags of bullshit. What he doesn’t have is a conscience or morality. He is a professional liar who has forgotten, if he ever knew, how to tell the truth. And he is one of John Howard’s greatest mates.

What is especially chilling is the masterful way in which the Bush administration, probably under the guidance of Karl Rove, manipulated a willing, compliant media and engineered the stories. Remember the “smoking gun” that was about to turn into a “mushroom cloud” – the urgency in that which supposedly justified the pre-emptive invasion? Over and over again. Al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq repeated and repeated until with no evidence whatever, and after any link had been soundly disproven, most Americans still believed (as many still do, and as Cheney to this day suggests) that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.

 

Watch the video here.

Perhaps the most telling moment is Dan Rather‘s admission of:

“  …the fear that if you don’t go along, you get the reputation for being a troublemaker. There’s also the fear that, particularly in networks, they’ve become huge international conglomerates. They have big needs, legislative needs, regulatory needs, in Washington. Nobody has to send you a memo to tell you that that’s the case. You know. And that puts a seed in your mind of, well, if you stick your neck out, if you take the risk of going against the grain with your reporting is anybody gong to back you up?”

Or to put it another way, you can’t trust the mainstream media, whether so-called “liberal” or not, because everyone is looking out for their own career. Doing your job honourably, by practising actual journalism and telling the public what you discover, comes a distant second. What you are always going to get is the administration’s line. And it’s exactly the same in Australia. (I know.)

Here’s part of the transcript of the program:

“  Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn’t have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.

 

Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

 

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President – no questions asked.

Don’t you understand, John?

Apr 8, 2007 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Corruption, Democracy, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Don’t you understand, John?

It wasn’t about David Hicks:

How Howard fucked himself whether Hicks came home or not.

 

Hicks might go away out of the political limelight but the way Howard has treated him will be the reason Howard loses the next election. If he does, Howard has shown what he is really like and how he really works. We will never trust him on any issue, not security, certainly, and not even the economy, because he has outed himself as just one more sleazy politician, which he is (and always was), although less ethical and more unscrupulous than most.

The government can’t use the fact of Hicks’s conviction for electoral advantage or to support its anti-terrorist credentials.

They can’t say he got what was coming to him. They can’t admit they had a hand in his release. They can’t say they approve or disapprove of the sentence, (which is a big blow for Billy Bunter, Minister for Fishnets, who said before the “trial”:

“   Material support for terrorism is an immensely difficu… an immensely serious charge”

– such a serious charge that Hicks was sentenced to an “immensely serious” 9 months. It would probably seem an eternity, however, if Hicks was forced to listen to 9 months of Billy Bunter prattling on and on in his nauseating way.)

The LATimes reports Hicks’s prosecution saying that

“  Today in this courtroom we are on the front line of the war on terrorism, face to face with the enemy,”

[…]

“If Hicks was such a menace to Western security, as the U.S. government has alleged since his arrest in December 2001, asked staff attorney Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, “why was he given a sentence more appropriate for a drunk-driving offense?”

No-one really believed that Hicks was a real threat or even a real terrorist. But it was politically expedient for Howard and his echo-chamber to paint him so.

Robert Richter, QC, one of Australia’s most experienced criminal lawyers, said in a commentary for The Sunday Age that the trial was a sham that had wholly discredited the Pentagon’s war-crimes process.

“   The charade that took place at Guantánamo Bay would have done Stalin’s show trials proud. First there was indefinite detention without charge. Then there was the torture, however the Bush lawyers, including his attorney-general, might choose to describe it. Then there was the extorted confession of guilt.”

All that is left is the nauseating and immoral way the Government utterly abandoned a fellow Australian, the way they “threw him overboard”, and that knowledge has sunk deep into the Australian political memory alongside the other blatantly cynical lie of “children overboard”; the way the Government railroaded him and sacrificed him to its own (hoped-for) electoral advantage and as a convenient platform for mealy-mouthed political posturing.

What Australians know is that it could have been them, or someone in their own family, that became a pawn caught in Howard’s cadaverous political claw. They know that Howard would not have helped them, either, unless he saw an electoral advantage, or until he saw electoral disadvantage in inaction.

And we have watched the apologists, the far-right echo-chamber of Ackermann, Bolt, Devine, Milne, Henderson et al characterise a process which has shredded and trashed all our concepts of decency, fairness, legality and justice, which is at best unlawful and at worst treasonous, as righteous. We have watched them spin the entire process and the outcome as proper and “justified”.

If the law and the values Australians have fought for could be so easily discarded for the sake of political gain, career advancement and a false sense of security in a world made increasingly afraid by our “saviours”, then the law and our values would be worthless. But they are not. And Australians know it.

Australians like their values and they reject the chatterers’ claims that what was done was justified.

Australians will not forget what Howard did to a fellow Australian to feed his own prideful pomposity.

Australians know that Howard is infatuated with the egregious vandalising of historical notions of justice which is the hallmark of the Bush administration and of the way in which Bush (and Rove and Cheney) have systematically politicised the American bureaucracy.

Australians have known all along that the entire Guantánamo Bay exercise was a legal stinkbomb. They now know for certain that the entire exercise was a political and not a legal process because they have seen the clear evidence that Hicks’s release was politically motivated and politically engineered – engineered to help a friend, John Howard, with his own political struggle.

Australians in their wisdom recognise the jaw-dropping cynicism of Howard and Bush in their machinations about the Hicks matter and Guantánamo. Howard supported Guantánamo, acquiesced in it and promoted it while the rest of the world, including the British, had long rejected Guantánamo as an abomination,

In September 2006, in Sydney, Britain’s last Lord Chancellor, now rebadged as its first Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, Lord Falconer, denounced Guantánamo as a “shocking affront to the principles of democracy”, accusing the United States of “deliberately seeking to put detainees beyond the rule of law…”

“   It is a part of the acceptance of the rule of law that the courts will be able to exercise jurisdiction over the executive.

“Otherwise the conduct of the executive is not defined and restrained by law.

“It is because of that principle, that the USA, deliberately seeking to put the detainees beyond the reach of the law in Guantánamo Bay, is so shocking an affront to the principles of democracy.

“Without independent judicial control, we cannot give effect to the essential values of our society.”

Appropriately enough, Lord Falconer made his comments in his Magna Carta Lecture. Magna Carta established constraints on the monarchy (or, now, the executive government). The concept of habeas corpus, a fundamental of British legal heritage, preceded even the Magna Carta. Habeas corpus enshrines the right of a person detained by the authorities to be brought before a court of law so that the legality of the detention may be examined. Habeas corpus was trashed in the US last year by Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, with the assistance of the Republican Party and probably under the guidance of John Yoo.

John Howard, by acquiescing in the inhuman abuse that is Guantánamo Bay, and by laws passed in Australia last year, is complicit in this fundamental assault on British-heritage legal systems.

Howard openly declared that Hicks had broken no Australian laws and therefore he was pleased to be able to have him punished by another country under their illegal system.

He was willing to, and did – as did both Ruddock and Downer – declare him guilty without his having ever been charged with any offence or any evidence tested. This is in contrast to long-standing Australian values: the right to a fair and speedy trial and the presumption of innocence.

Even Texans have tried to explain the traditional American system to other Americans:

“  In Texas, we have a fair trial and then the hanging,”

said Texas Republican, John Cornyn, ‘one of the White House’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill’. He was defending Gonzalez’s right to be heard before being “sentenced” to political death over the US Attorneys affair.

And conservative(-ish), Andrew Sullivan, in The Atlantic Online, says

“   So Cheney goes to Australia and meets with John Howard who tells him that the Hicks case is killing him in Australia, and he may lose the next election because of it. Hicks’s case is then railroaded to the front of the Gitmo kangaro court line, and put through a “legal” process almost ludicrously inept, with two of Hicks’ three lawyers thrown out on one day, then an abrupt plea-bargain, with a transparently insincere confession. Hicks is then given a mere nine months in jail in Australia, before being set free. Who negotiated the plea-bargain? Hicks’ lawyer. Who did he negotiate with? Not the prosecutors, as would be normal, but Susan J. Crawford, the top military commission official. Who is Susan J. Crawford? She served as Dick Cheney’s Inspector General while he was Defense Secretary.

My, what a surprise to see the ghastly hand of Dick Cheney over all of this!

Howard may wish that the argument was over and Hicks would cease being an issue. But the treatment of Hicks is already the main issue and the chain around Howard’s ankle attached to a block of concrete. It doesn’t matter if no-one ever mentions it again, because Howard has lost his credibility and his image as an Honest John, as someone dedicated to protect Australians, as someone who stands up for Australians. The Howard reputation is shot and nothing he can do now can change that.

Howard has shown himself to be a latter-day Pontius Pilate.

He washed his hands of Hicks and everyone knows it.

He did the same with Nguyen Tuong Van and left him to hang out to die in Singapore.

He showed similar compassion for Robert Jovocic.

He meekly acquiesced when AFP Commissioner, Michael Joseph Keelty, APM, delivered the Bali 9 – Australians who could have been dealt with in an Australian court – to the Indonesians on a deadly platter, potentially to face a firing squad.

On the other hand he showed actual concern and support for his “mates” in AWB through his and his Ministers’ timely amnesia.

Let’s be clear. Hicks is a dickhead. Probably. He is not a popular hero. He is no Ned Kelly.

It has never been about him. It has been about the rule of law. It has been about decency and propriety, about the treatment of him by this government and the political use of him by this Prime Minister.

John Howard can no longer pretend to be Australia’s political father figure. He’s shown himself to be just another politician who can’t be trusted.

We have seen what Howard did to one of the “sons” of his own country. We have seen, by contrast, what a real father does: he fights unconditionally for a son he loves, even when he disagrees with what he did.

When Australians compare John Howard with Terry Hicks they know whom they admire. And whom they despise. They know who is showing them how to be a real human being and a real Australian.

They now see all Howard’s fatuous gravitas for what it has always been – insincere, inauthentic, greedy, compassionless, political posturing. Howard, Australia now knows, is a small man of stunted character, an unethical man, a pretender, pretending that he is not the dork he has been all along.

Meanwhile, the ANU confers on the arrogant, racist despot of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, an honorary Doctorate so as to ingratiate itself with the Singapore government (which means Lee’s nepotistically installed son, effectively Van Nguyen’s executioner) for financial advantage (or, as they put it, “to further the university’s relationship with Singapore”). When such an award can be contemplated, much less approved, by an institution of higher learning and academic independence, Howard’s castration of Australia is almost complete.

Guantánamo Career Suicide

Feb 24, 2007 | Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Guantánamo Career Suicide

 Guantánamo Policy Chief Pulls Plug on Career:
Spills Government Beans in Radio Interview

 

 

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Guantánamo Policy, Charles “Cully” Stimson, resigned following uproar over a 12 January interview on Federal Newsradio, a propaganda front for the Bush administration. In the interview Stimson stated,

“I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there? And you know what, it’s shocking.”

When the interviewer asked who was paying for the legal representation, Stimson replied,

“It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

And then:

“I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

This was enough not only to offend everyone who believes in and supports western democratic values, justice and the rule of law but also to incense large numbers of professional legal practitioners across the USA.

However, it’s not the first time US military officials have criticized Guantánamo defense lawyers.

In March of last year, Col. Moe Davis, chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo tribunals, told journalists that several major law firms that have defense contractors as paying clients are providing pro bono lawyers to defend Guantánamo detainees in habeas petitions.

“It’s somewhat ironic that the weaponry that we use in the war on terrorism is helping fund the defense of the alleged terrorists,” Davis said at the time.

This is the same Col. Moe Davis who is the Prosecutor in David Hicks’s case, who has lately been in the news in Australia, insisting that Hicks is the world’s blackest murderer since Hitler, and on Insight1 with Jenny Brockie on SBS2.

The Administration and the Pentagon effected to be embarrassed by Stimson’s loyal fervour.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said Stimson was not speaking for the Bush administration.

Stimson’s comments “do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the thinking of its leadership,” Maka said.

Stimson apologised within days claiming that

“those comments do not reflect my core beliefs”

Of course what he said does clearly express his core beliefs.

He was comfortable, relaxed and confident in the radical right wing atmosphere of the radio station with its right wing propagandist presenters. He was comfortable, relaxed and confident that he was expressing administration policy, thinking and attitudes.

It was no slip of the tongue, no moment of passion, no mad aberration. He was under no duress, and was very definitely not being flustered by tough questioning. He offered the information quite unprompted. He arrived at the interview intending to say what he said. He came prepared with a list of at least 12 of the 14 the law firms who had been disclosed as representing Guantánamo inmates.

There can be no doubt that he planned to say what he said and that what he said expressed his core beliefs. He is a practised, experienced propagandist who was repeating the company message which he had delivered almost word for word elsewhere and more than once:

GENE ROBINSON, Washington Post columnist (from audiotape): “…calls into question, really, the United States’ commitment to the values and ideals that we said we want to spread throughout the world, such as due process and rule of law. And Guantánamo seems to mock those values.”

 

KUR: How do you answer that?

 

MR. STIMSON: He’s wrong. That doesn’t mock those values at all. Indeed, we’re giving more rights to these terrorists than our own soldiers got during any conflict when they were detained or the Nazis got when they were detained during World War II. During war, you’re not entitled to a trial. You’re not entitled to criminal charges.

Stimson has consistently over time reinforced his message about the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo:

  • It is transparent and humane
  • Prisoners are not entitled to a trial
  • They get more than they deserve or have a right to
  • There is minimal opposition to the holding of these prisoners
  • They release a lot of people
  • The media are irresponsible in their reporting
  • The inmates are unquestionably guilty

In fact…

  • These are “the very terrorists” who are personally responsible for the financial losses incurred by American companies after 9/11.

Stimson claims that over 2000 journalists, 500 media outlets have been there to see what goes on to the point that Guantánamo is

“probably the most transparent and open location in the world”.

However, the Washington Post has reported that

“Journalists could not talk to detainees, they had to be accompanied by a military escort and their photos were censored. Now, the Pentagon has shut down access entirely _ at least temporarily.”

Stimson claimed that media organisations are “irresponsible” for not showing the new prison at Guantánamo but continue to show Camp X-ray footage. After all, they have access to “B-roll” footage of the new facility but they don’t show it. “Ask yourself why?” he said, “Are they fair and balanced, or do they have an agenda?”

It is a reasonably safe bet that news organisations are not permitted to originate their own footage and that what Stimson describes as the “B-roll footage” is shot by the Defense Department and is entirely sanitised, showing only what Defense wants outsiders to see and nothing that they would not want outsiders to see.

Meanwhile, FBI agents have documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at Guantánamo. In one, a detainee’s head was wrapped in duct tape because he chanted the Quran; in a second, a detainee pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room.

In a December 2006 court ruling, a federal judge in Washington decried the plight of “some of the unfortunate petitioners who have been detained for many years in the terrible conditions at Guantánamo Bay.”

Stimson characterises local and international public opposition to the Guantánamo detentions as

“…small little protests around the world – really quite minor – drummed up by Amnesty International trying to get their loyal, ardent followers to show up – these are a couple dozen here, a couple dozen folks there…”

Can detainees be released without trial?

CAUSEY: You have about 395 detainees there and I believe something like 340 others have previously been released to their home countries.?

 

STIMSON: 377 detainees, Mike, have been transferred or released from Guantánamo. Just in 2006 alone we transferred 114. We’re on track to transfer or release, you know, 70, 80, 90, 100 in the coming year. Now those numbers are hard to guess because of the diplomatic negotiations. What’s important to know is that those 395 that are there on the island now, roughly 70 to 80 have already been approved for transfer or release. So we’re just waiting for those countries to step up and accept responsibility and mitigate the threat that these guys pose.

Obviously detainees can be, and are, released without trial. It’s just a matter of “diplomacy”. As far as the American Administration is concerned they, but particularly those concerned with Guantánamo, are constrained by no laws. They can hold or release inmates on a whim. Even the politically careful Australian Prime Minister John Howard has said as much, insisting that if David Hicks is not brought to trial before the end of the year he will have him repatriated. He will not ask. He will require.

(This is directly contrary to Mr Cheney’s claims in Sydney (24 February) that “he cannot speed up the process”. One of them is a liar or both of them are liars. Place your vote here.)

And here is what has become of the presumption of innocence in the American justice system as expressed by Cuddly Stimson:

NORRIS: Is there a possibility that there are some folks on Guantánamo that don’t belong there?
STIMSON: Not now.

Referring to Stimson’s lame apology before his ultimate (forced) resignation, the Ethics Scoreboard says:

Stimson’s apology is a lie, and obviously so. What he calls his “core beliefs” are nothing of the kind. They are his official beliefs, the principles that he is required to support officially (that is, give lip service to) as a member of the bar and a high-ranking official in a democracy. True core beliefs are what you reveal when your guard is down, not what you contradict.

The reaction to Stimson’s vilification of Guantánamo defenders was swift and strident. Just a few of these will give the flavour.

The National Lawyers Guild

The undersigned organizations call for the censure of Mr. Charles “Cully” Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, for statements attacking the lawyers who are defending the Guantánamo detainees. Mr. Stimson’s remarks are aimed at chilling the willingness of lawyers to represent those persons imprisoned at Guantánamo, and are contrary to bedrock principles of the right to counsel and the presumption of innocence.

The threats by Mr. Stimson are not subtle. They imply these pro bono lawyers are terrorists. They exhort corporations to pull business from the firms where these lawyers are employed. These remarks are slanderous, and violate the free association rights of these lawyers and their firms.

The Society of American Law Teachers (representing over 800 members at 165 law schools):

Mr. Stimson – who, as a lawyer, should know better – has violated the highest standards of our profession by challenging the lawyers engaged in pro bono representation of Guantánamo detainees and calling on the clients of their law firms to withhold their business from those firms. Lawyers are essential to upholding the rule of law in our country, and the rule of law is precisely what the President claims the United States is defending in the “war on terror.”

And from the American Bar Association:

Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.” She is right. Stimson should be immediately fired for what he said last week and, furthermore, he should be investigated for breaching the code of professional ethics. Not only were the remarks nasty, they were politically and diplomatically unwise.

 

What Stimson said, and why, and how, constitutes conduct unbecoming a member of government and a member of the bar. One hand may be acting aggressively, if not mercifully and justly, toward prosecuting suspected terrorists. But the other hand, Stimson’s hand, is undercutting the very principles we fight for. This is how our government waged the legal war on terror in our name last week.

 

As Thomas Paine wrote of the United States years ago, “This is a government of laws, and not men” – the unchecked power of even the President is not part of democracy or our system of justice.

Shortly after his apology, which was not accepted by any but the most hardline in the Bush Administration, Stimson resigned.

Some see the direct hand of John Yoo in the authorship of the letter of “apology”.
John Yoo’s position can be described as “justice in the service of politics”, rather than what we would normally expect, “politics in the service of justice”.
John Yoo’s judicial politics can be traced to Dick Cheney.

Salon reported an interview with Yoo regarding torture. The interviewer asked:

“If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?”

 

“No treaty,” replied John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who wrote the crucial memos justifying President Bush’s policies on torture, “war on terror” detainees and domestic surveillance without warrants. Yoo made these assertions at a public debate in December [2005] in Chicago, where he also espoused the radical notion of the “unitary executive” — the idea that the president as commander in chief is the sole judge of the law, unbound by hindrances such as the Geneva Conventions, and possesses inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies to his fiat. This concept is the cornerstone of the Bush legal doctrine.

Salon also says

Yoo, who left the Justice Department two years ago and is now a law professor at Boalt Hall at the University of California at Berkeley, was the prolific writer. But he was not the author of the process…Then, as now, the driving force was Vice President Cheney.
Cheney’s idea of the head of state invested with absolute power is a venerable one. Bush’s presidency is the latest experiment to achieve it…

 

The original commentary on it appeared in a pamphlet published in 1776, “Common Sense,” written by Tom Paine:

 

“But where say some is the King of America? I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.”

So what does Stimson believe to be “Truth, Justice and the American way”?

“DoD official says some Guantánamo detainees may be imprisoned for life”. More than 300 prisoners now held by the US at Guantanamo Bay could remain there under US military detention for the rest of their lives, DoD Deputy Assistant Secretary for Detainee Affairs Charles “Cully” Stimson told Reuters during a routine visit to the base last week.

Ethics Scoreboard has named Charles “Cully” Stimson Liar of the Month for January 2007

 

1 The Insight webpage has a poll which asks “Should David Hicks be brought home?”
Voting is 93% in favour of Hicks’s immediate return.

 

Hypocrite, Sociopath or Fool?

Feb 17, 2007 | Australian Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Hypocrite, Sociopath or Fool?

Almost Human?

In her column explaining ‘the key to understanding the Prime Minister,’ Anne Summers offers an explanation for the Groveller General’s attitude towards Iraq, terrorisim and Barack Obama. But it is just not good enough, says our investigative journalist.

“On the morning when the planes hit the twin towers and the Pentagon, the smoke from which Howard had a view from his hotel, he had an epiphany; perhaps for the first, and only, time in his life he experienced compassion for fellow humans.”

“I couldn’t get out of my mind the desperation of the people who were trapped in those buildings and the sense of loss and despair of those families.”

This could make him seem, well, almost human. Until you consider what he did then: he eagerly agreed to, barracked for and participated in – and continues to agree to, barrack for and participate in, without apology or admission of error – a visitation upon the people of Iraq (a country not associated with the events that had so upset him) a retributive storm of violence and destruction that has produced the very same “desperation of the people who were trapped in those buildings and the sense of loss and despair of those families”, except that at this stage the horror he has sanctioned and helped unleash has affected at least a hundred times as many people, almost all of them innocent civilians.

A person who becomes emotional about three thousand Americans but is sanguine about the suffering and death of how many hundred thousand Iraqis and their families and communities, suffering and death which he personally was a party to, is unbalanced at best.

A person who can happily allow these two things to co-exist peacefully in their mind is a hypocrite, a sociopath, or a fool. Or all of the above.”

 

 

Blackberry Massage Parlours

ABC reports “Relief at hand for NYC text addicts”
Apparently American hotels are offering hand massages for texters.

“Mobile phone addicts who spend hours on end sending text messages, emails or talking on their phone can now seek a ‘BlackBerry Thumb’ massage for their sore hands”

But we always knew that any decent concierge could arrange a massage with manual relief.

 

 

I am definitely unhappy about this

ABC also reported:

“Man critical after stabbing in Sydney suburb”

And so you would be!

The headline was changed later in the morning to “Man stabbed in chest during Sydney brawl”.

Oddly enough, ABC had four years earlier (19/12/2002) reported, almost identically,

“Sydney man critical after stabbing”.