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Israeli Police Break Into Media Office In East Jerusalem, Attack Locals and Visitors

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – April 02, 2010

The Israeli Police attacked on Thursday Wadi Hilwa Media Center, in Silwan’s Wadi Hilwa neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, and violently attacked employees and visitors, leading to several injuries, the Palestine News Network (PNN) reported.

Fakhri Abu Diab, head of the Committee for Defending the Lands and Properties of Silwan, said that Jawad Siyam, head of the center was wounded in his shoulder and back, while employee Ramadan Al Banna, and resident Ahmad Al Natsha suffered eye injuries, while two women, visiting the center, were violently pushed around by the police.

The police also kidnapped Yazan Siyam, 14, while he was at the center and violently attacked his younger brother, Ali, as he followed the soldiers crying, while they dragged his brother.

Abu Diab slammed the Israeli attack, especially since the soldiers were accompanied by extremist Jewish settlers.

Speaking from his hospital bed at the Al Makassid Hospital in East Jerusalem, Jawad Siyam, said that the attack is “barbaric” , and that when he asked the police about a warrant, the police and the settlers said “we are the law here, nothing is above us”, and started attacking and insulting every person who was there.

On Thursday at dawn, the Israelis invaded Al Bustan neighborhood and kidnapped five residents identified as Khalaf Odah, 62, Mohammad Odah, 38, Hammouda Siyam, Sa’id Zaytoun, and Daoud Siyam.

Khalad, Mohammad and Hammouda were released on bail, while the remand of the Sa’id and Daoud was extended until Sunday for further interrogation.

Abu Diab stated that Silwan is subject to frequent Israeli military and settler attacks, and that the provocative acts of the police and fundamentalist settlers are meant to terrify the residents to force them out of their homes and lands.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israel army ‘routinely’ fires on Palestinian journalists

Ma’an – 01/04/2010

Bethlehem – Reporters Without Borders has deplored the frequency of alleged press freedom violations by the Israeli military, whose forces the Paris-based press freedom group says routinely fire on Palestinian journalists.

At least eight journalists were injured by shots fired by Israeli soldiers during March in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

“The incidents continue with complete impunity,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The IDF soldiers involved are rarely punished and, less still, disowned by the superiors, who endorse the use of violence against media personnel. It is time this stopped.”

In the most recent incident, Falestin TV journalist Harun Amayra was injured in the foot by a shot fired by an Israeli soldier while he was covering a peaceful demonstration marking Earth Day in Badras, a village to the west of Ramallah, on 30 March. Around 10 demonstrators were also injured by Israeli gunfire. Amayra was hospitalized in Ramallah.

A crew working for satellite TV station Al-Quds were blocked for several hours by Israeli troops at the Qalandiya checkpoint on 25 March while on their way to present a live broadcast from Jerusalem. After interrogating presenter Raed Fathi, the soldiers banned him from entering the city for a week.

Falestin TV reporter Harun Amayra and cameraman Najib Sharoneh were doing a report in the village of Badras on 19 March when Israeli soldiers accosted them, hit them and then detained them for nearly four hours.

The same day, Israeli soldiers banned journalists from entering the village of Ni’lin, near Ramallah, where the reporters had wanted to cover the weekly protest against Israel’s West Bank barrier.

An Israeli soldier fired a tear-gas grenade at photographer Nasser Al-Shouyoukhi of The Associated Press during clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian youths on 17 March in Hebron. Rubber-coated bullets and tear-gas canisters were also fired at photographer Issam Al-Rimawi while he was covering events at the Qalandiya checkpoint.

Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets at three Palestinian photographers – Mahmoud Alyan and Mahfouz Abou Turk (who both work for the daily Al-Quds) and Ahmed Al-Gharabli of Agence France-Presse – while they were covering clashes between soldiers and Palestinian youths outside the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on 5 March.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

The criminal NSA eavesdropping program

By Glenn Greenwald | April 1, 2010

While torture and aggressive war may have been the most serious crimes which the Bush administration committed, its warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens was its clearest and most undeniable lawbreaking.  Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker yesterday became the third federal judge — out of three who have considered the question — to find that Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program was illegal (the other two are District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor and 6th Circuit Appellate Judge Ronald Gilman who, on appeal from Judge Taylor’s decision, in dissent reached the merits of that question [unlike the two judges in the majority who reversed the decision on technical “standing” grounds] and adopted Taylor’s conclusion that the NSA program was illegal).

That means that all 3 federal judges to consider the question have concluded that Bush’s NSA program violated the criminal law (FISA).  That law provides that anyone who violates it has committed a felony and shall be subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense.  The law really does say that.  Just click on that link and you’ll see.  It’s been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law — committed felonies — in spying on Americans without warrants.  Yet another federal judge has now found their conduct illegal.  If we were a country that actually lived under The Rule of Law, this would be a huge story, one that would produce the same consequences for the lawbreakers as a bank robbery, embezzlement or major drug dealing.  But since we’re not such a country, it isn’t and it doesn’t.

Although news reports are focusing (appropriately) on the fact that Bush’s NSA program was found to be illegal, the bulk of Judge Walker’s opinion was actually a scathing repudiation of the Obama DOJ.  In fact, the opinion spent almost no time addressing the merits of the claim that the NSA program was legal.  That’s because the Obama DOJ — exactly like the Bush DOJ in the case before Judge Taylor — refused to offer legal justifications to the court for this eavesdropping.  Instead, the Obama DOJ took the imperial and hubristic position that the court had no right whatsoever to rule on the legality of the program because (a) plaintiffs could not prove they were subjected to the secret eavesdropping (and thus lacked “standing” to sue) and (b) the NSA program was such a vital “state secret” that courts were barred from adjudicating its legality.

Those were the arguments that Judge Walker scathingly rejected.  All of the court’s condemnations of the DOJ’s pretense to imperial power were directed at the Obama DOJ’s “state secrets” argument (which is exactly the same radical and lawless version, as TPM compellingly documented, used by the Bush DOJ  to such controversy).  From the start, the Obama DOJ has engaged in one extraordinary maneuver after the next to shield this criminal surveillance program from judicial scrutiny. Indeed, their stonewalling at one point became so extreme that the court actually threatened the Obama DOJ with sanctions.  And what TPM calls the Obama DOJ’s “Bush-mimicking state secrets defense” has been used by them in one case after the next to conceal and shield from judicial review a wide range of Bush crimes — including torture, renditions and surveillance.  As the Electronic Frontiers Foundation put it:  “In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s.”

That’s why this decision is such a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration:  because it is their Bush-copying tactics, used repeatedly to cover up government crimes, which the court yesterday so emphatically rejected.  And it’s thus no surprise that media accounts tie the Obama administration to the cover-up of this program at least as much as the Bush administration.  See, for instance:  Charlie Savage and James Risen in The New York Times (“A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush”); Time (“The judge’s opinion is pointed and fiercely critical of the Obama Administration’s Justice Department lawyers” and “The judge claims that the Obama Administration is attempting to place itself above the law“).  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals also previously condemned the Bush/Obama “state secrets” position as abusive and lawless.

In December, 2005, The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been doing for years exactly that which the law unambiguously said was a felony:  eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans (telephone calls and emails) without warrants.  We knew then it was a crime.   Three federal judges have now concluded that it was illegal.  And yet not only do we do nothing about it, but we stand by as the Obama administration calls this criminal program a vital “state secret” and desperately tries to protect it and the lawbreakers from being subject to the rule of law.  This decision may make it more difficult for the Obama administration to hide behind sweeping secrecy claims in the future, but it won’t negate the fact that we have decided that our leading political officials are completely free to commit crimes while in power and to do so with total impunity.

* * * * *

One related note:  back when Judge Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush NSA program was unconstitutional, law professors Orin Kerr and Ann Althouse (the former a sometimes-Bush-apologist and the latter a constant one) viciously disparaged her and her ruling by claiming that she failed to give sufficient attention to the Government’s arguments as to why the program was legal.  Althouse was even allowed to launch that attack in an Op-Ed in The New York Times. But as I documented at the time, the argument made by these right-wing law professors to attack Judge Taylor was grounded in total ignorance:  the reason the court there didn’t pay much attention to the legal justifications for the NSA program was because the Bush DOJ — just like the Obama DOJ here — refused to offer any such justifications, insisting instead that the court had no right even to consider the case.

That’s why I find it darkly amusing that, today, the same Orin Kerr is solemnly lecturing The New York Times that Judge Walker here did not consider the merits of the claims about the program’s legality because the Obama DOJ argued instead “that Judge Walker couldn’t reach the merits of the case because of the state secrets privilege.”  Kerr is wrong when he says that this ruling does not constitute a decision that the Bush NSA program was illegal — it does exactly that, because the plaintiffs offered evidence and arguments to prove it was illegal and the Obama DOJ (like the Bush DOJ before it) failed to offer anything to the contrary — but he ‘s right that Judge Walker did not focus on the merits of the defenses to the NSA program because the Obama DOJ (like the Bush DOJ) refused to raise any such defenses.  But exactly the same thing was true for Judge Taylor when she ruled three years ago that the NSA program was illegal, which is why the right-wing attacks on her judicial abilities back then (led by Kerr and Althouse) were so frivolous and misinformed.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

NSA Wiretap Program Declared Illegal

Marc Ambinder | The Atlantic | March 31, 2010

The National Security Agency broke the law when it wiretapped two American lawyers working for the El-Haramain Charity Foundation, an judge ruled Wednesday.

The government has not decided whether to appeal this long-awaited decision, as it touches on subjects ranging from the state secrets privilege to the breadth of President Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

The ruling is a major symbolic victory for civil libertarians, although its effects on future cases will be limited, and no more information about the program will be disclosed. El-Haramain v. Obama has bounced back and forth from District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, the chief judge for federal courts in Northern California, to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected a government motion to dismiss it entirely. Another important victory for civil libertarians: Vaughn held that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be given more weight than the state secrets privilege.

For months, the government argued that the charity could not possibly establish, using unclassified information, that it had been spied upon. It argued that even though the TSP had been revealed, it could not turn over other evidence in the case without jeopardizing national security. Several judges have seen the evidence and disagreed. People familiar with the case believe that the evidence relates to the mechanism by which the surveillance program was carried out: perhaps a third country, or private contractors, assisted the NSA.

So,  the Justice Department asserted the “state secrets privilege” and refused to provide the plaintiffs with classified evidence that would show whether or not the charity had actually been wiretapped.

Of course, this was a bit of a game, because the government accidentally gave the plaintiffs a number of classified documents which proved conclusively that the charity’s phone lines were tapped by the National Security Agency.

Still, it was up to the charity to establish that its communications were intercepted solely on the basis of the public record — and that the wiretapping was, on its merits, illegal.  The judge agreed today that both thresholds had been reached. Some civil libertarians wanted him to order a full trial, which would have revealed more about the program. This, Walker did not do. Still, his ruling, if it stands, will serve as a check on the unconstrained use of executive power.

Walker, an inventive and creative judge who is also presiding over the trial about the legality of the gay-marriage-banning Proposition 8, was clearly skeptical of the government’s contentions and its legal tactics.

Still, he went out of his way to give the government a chance to make its case. And he did not declare the use of the state secrets privilege to be invalid, which may be one reason why the government might decide not to appeal the ruling.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Mike McConnell, the Washington Post & the dangers of sleazy corporatism

By Glenn Greenwald | March 29, 2010

In a political culture drowning in hidden conflicts of interests, exploitation of political office for profit, and a rapidly eroding wall separating the public and private spheres, Michael McConnell stands out as the perfect embodiment of all those afflictions.  Few people have blurred the line between public office and private profit more egregiously and shamelessly than he.  McConnell’s behavior is the classic never-ending “revolving door” syndrome:  public officials serve private interests while in office and are then lavishly rewarded by those same interests once they leave.  He went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.

But that’s the least of what makes McConnell such a perfect symbol for the legalized corruption that dominates Washington.  Tellingly, his overarching project while at Booz Allen and in public office was exactly the same:  the outsourcing of America’s intelligence and surveillance functions (including domestic surveillance) to private corporations, where those activities are even more shielded than normal from all accountability and oversight and where they generate massive profit at the public expense.  Prior to becoming Bush’s DNI, McConnell, while at Booz Allen, was chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of NSA and CIA contractors devoted to expanding the privatization of government intelligence functions.

Then, as Bush’s DNI, McConnell dramatically expanded the extent to which intelligence functions were outsourced to the same private industry that he long represented.  Worse, he became the leading spokesman for demanding full immunity for lawbreaking telecoms for their participation in Bush’s illegal NSA programs — in other words, he exploited “national security” claims and his position as DNI to win the dismissal of lawsuits against the very lawbreaking industry he represented as INSA Chairman, including, almost certainly, Booz Allen itself.  Having exploited his position as DNI to lavishly reward and protect the private intelligence industry, he then returns to its loving arms to receive from them lavish personal rewards of his own.

It’s vital to understand how this really works:  it isn’t that people like Mike McConnell move from public office to the private sector and back again.  That implies more separation than really exists.  At this point, it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity — with a public division and a private one.  When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it’s more like an intra-corporate re-assignment than it is changing employers.  When McConnell serves as DNI, he’s simply in one division of this entity and when he’s at Booz Allen, he’s in another, but it’s all serving the same entity (it’s exactly how insurance giant Wellpoint dispatched one of its Vice Presidents to Max Baucus’ office so that she could write the health care plan that the Congress eventually enacted).

In every way that matters, the separation between government and corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes to the National Security and Surveillance State.  Indeed, so extreme is this overlap that even McConnell, when he was nominated to be Bush’s DNI, told The New York Times that his ten years of working “outside the government,” for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the nation’s intelligence functions.  That’s because his Booz Allen work was indistinguishable from working for the Government, and therefore — as he put it — being at Booz Allen “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left.”

As the NSA scandal revealed, private telecom giants and other corporations now occupy the central role in carrying out the government’s domestic surveillance and intelligence activities — almost always in the dark, beyond the reach of oversight or the law.  As Tim Shorrock explained in his definitive 2007 Salon piece on the relationship between McConnell, Booz Allen, and the intelligence community, in which (to no avail) he urged Senate Democrats to examine these relationships before confirming McConnell as Bush’s DNI:

[Booz Allen’s] website states that the Booz Allen team “employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel.” TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.

Among those on Booz Allen’s payroll are former CIA Director and neoconservative extremist James Woolsey, George Tenet’s former Chief of Staff Joan Dempsey, and Keith Hall, the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret organization that oversees the nation’s spy satellites.  As Shorrock wrote:  “Under McConnell’s watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs the Bush administration has run, including the infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme” and “is almost certainly participating in the agency’s warrantless surveillance of the telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens.”  For more details on the sprawling and overlapping relationships between McConnell, Booz Allen, the INSA, the Government and the private intelligence community, see Shorrock’s interview with Democracy Now and his 2008 interview with me.

Aside from the general dangers of vesting government power in private corporations — this type of corporatism (control of government by corporations) was the hallmark of many of the worst tyrannies of the last century — all of this is big business beyond what can be described.  The attacks of 9/11 exploded the already-huge and secret intelligence budget.  Shorrock estimates that “about 50 percent of this spending goes directly to private companies” and “spending on intelligence since 2002 is much higher than the total of $33 billion the Bush administration paid to Bechtel, Halliburton and other large corporations for reconstruction projects in Iraq.”

* * * * *

All of that is crucial background for understanding just how pernicious and deceitful is the Op-Ed published this weekend by The Washington Post and authored by McConnell.  The overarching theme is all-too-familiar:  we face a grave threat from Terrorists and other Very Bad People (“cyber wars”), and our only hope for protection is to vest the Government with massive new powers.  Specifically, McConnell advocates a so-called “reeingeer[ing] of the Internet” to allow the Government and private corporations far greater capability to track what is being done over the Internet and who is doing it:

The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing. It’s that simple. . . . If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce — or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions — chaos would result. Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well.

Scary!  And what do we need to submit to in order to avoid these calamaties?  This:

The United States must also translate our intent into capabilities. We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds.  More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable.

In one sense, this is just typical fear-mongering of the type the National Security State has used for decades to beat frightened Americans into virtually full-scale submission:  you are in grave danger and you can be safe only by vesting in us far greater power, which we’ll operate in secret:  here, allowing us to “reengineer” the Internet so we can control it.

Think about how dangerous that power is in relationship to the war I wrote about this weekend being waged on WikiLeaks, which allows the uploading of leaked, secret documents that expose the corruption of the world’s most powerful interests.  This “reengineering of the Internet” proposed by McConnell would almost certainly enable the easy tracing of anyone who participates.  It would, by design, destroy the ability of anyone to participate or communicate in any way on the Internet under the shield of anonymity.  Wired‘s Ryan Singel — noting that “the biggest threat to the open internet is . . .  Michael McConnell” — documents the dangers from this “cyber-war” monitioring policy and how much momentum there now is in the Executive and Legislative branches for legislation to implement it (as a result of initiatives that began during the Bush era, under McConnell, and which continue unabated).

But there’s something even worse going on here.  McConnell doesn’t merely want to empower the Government to control the Internet this way; he wants to empower private corporations to do so — the same corporations which pay him and whose interests he has long served.   He notes that this “reengineering” is already possible because “the technologies are already available from public and private sources,” and explicitly calls for a merger of the NSA with private industry to create a sprawling, omnipotent network for monitoring the Internet:

To this end, we must hammer out a consensus on how to best harness the capabilities of the National Security Agency, which I had the privilege to lead from 1992 to 1996.   The NSA is the only agency in the United States with the legal authority, oversight and budget dedicated to breaking the codes and understanding the capabilities and intentions of potential enemies. The challenge is to shape an effective partnership with the private sector so information can move quickly back and forth from public to private — and classified to unclassified — to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure.

We must give key private-sector leaders (from the transportation, utility and financial arenas) access to information on emerging threats so they can take countermeasures. For this to work, the private sector needs to be able to share network information — on a controlled basis — without inviting lawsuits from shareholders and others. . . .

[T]the reality is that while the lion’s share of cybersecurity expertise lies in the federal government, more than 90 percent of the physical infrastructure of the Web is owned by private industry. Neither side on its own can mount the cyber-defense we need; some collaboration is inevitable. Recent reports of a possible partnership between Google and the government point to the kind of joint efforts — and shared challenges — that we are likely to see in the future.

No doubt, such arrangements will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the private sector. We must define the parameters of such interactions, but we should not dismiss them. Cyberspace knows no borders, and our defensive efforts must be similarly seamless.

In other words, not only the Government, but the private intelligence corporations which McConnell represents (and which are subjected to no oversight), will have access to virtually unfettered amounts of information and control over the Internet, and there should be “no borders” between them.  And beyond the dangerous power that will vest in the public-private Surveillance State, it will also generate enormous profits for Booz Allen, the clients it serves and presumably for McConnell himself — though The Washington Post does not bother to disclose any of that to its readers.  The Post basically allowed McConnell to publish in its Op-Ed pages a blatant advertisement for the private intelligence industry while masquerading as a National Security official concerned with Keeping America Safe.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the “cyber-war” policies for which McConnell is shilling is the top priority of the industry he serves.  Right this very minute, the front page of the intelligence industry’s INSA website (previously chaired by McConnell) trumpets the exact public-private merger for “cyber-war” policies which McConnell uses the Post to advocate:

The Report just published by that that industry group (.pdf) is entitled “Addressing Cyber Security Through Public-Private Partnership.”  The industry’s Report sounds like a virtually exact replica of what McConnell just published in the Post:  America is under grave threat and can Stay Safe only by transferring huge amounts of public funds to these private corporations in order to restructure the Internet to allow better detection and monitoring.  And look at the truly Orwellian and unintentionally revealing logo under which the Report is written:  showing a complete linkage of Government institutions (such as Congress and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence corporations, and the Internet (click on image to enlarge):

Readers of The Washington Post, exposed to McConnell’s Op-Ed, would know none of this.  They would think that they were reading the earnest National Security recommendations of a former top military and government official, and would have no idea about the massive profit motives driving him.  Although the Op-Ed, at the end, identifies McConnell as “executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, which consults on cybersecurity for the private and public sector” (as well as a former NSA head, DNI, and retired Admiral), there’s no hint that Booz Allen, its multiple clients, and the industry it represents (along with McConnell himself) would stand to benefit greatly from the very policies he advocates in The Post.  Indeed, just like the INSA, the Booz Allen website, at the top, this very minute promotes the exact policies McConnell advocates:

So here we have a perfect merger of (a) exploiting public office for personal profit, (b) endless increases in the Surveillance State achieved through rank fear-mongering, (c) the rapid elimination of any line between the public and private sectors, and (d) individuals deceitfully posing as “objective commentators” who are, in fact, manipulating our political debates on behalf of undisclosed interests.

And, as usual, it is our nation’s largest media outlets (in this case The Washington Post) which provide the venue for these policies to be advocated and glorified, all the while not only failing to expose — but actively obscuring — the bulging conflicts of interests that drive them.  While “news” outlets distract Americans with the petty partisan dramas of the day, these factions — whose power is totally impervious to changes in party control — continue to expand their stranglehold on how the Government functions in ways that fundamentally alter our core privacy and liberties, and radically expand the role private corporations and government power play in our lives.

March 31, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

French justice minister threatens Israel critics with jail

Press TV – March 31, 2010

Pro-Palestinian solidarity groups in France have been threatened by the French justice minister with legal action, after they stepped up a campaign of boycotts against Israeli goods.

On March 30, Palestinian Land Day, French activists held large rallies across the country and joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign against Israel.

Thousands of people held a protest in Paris in solidarity with Palestinians and urged the imposition of sanctions on Israeli products. The protesters took to the streets and large supermarkets and called on shoppers to boycott Israeli products.

This prompted an outburst from the French Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who called on the judiciary to prosecute the critics of Israel on the pretext of “racial discrimination,” although many Jewish people are also active in the BDS campaign to end Israel’s discriminatory policies against the Palestinians, press TV correspondent Mark Votier reported.

The justice minister’s threat drew thousand people to sign a BDS petition protesting against the violation of their right to free expression and association, enshrined in various legal instruments including the European Convention on Human Rights.

“I do not wish to be arrested but if the minister considers us to be criminals and wants to arrests us, she can. We are here to show our solidarity with Palestinians and especially with the people of Gaza who are suffering terribly,” Nichole Kiil Nielsen, member of European parliament told Press TV.

March 31, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

SNEAKY FLYING SPY CAMERAS PROVOKE CIVIL LIBERTY FEARS

Story Image

By Rod Mills | Express | March 29, 2010

CIVIL liberties groups have condemned a sinister new plan for Scottish police forces to spy on ordinary citizens using unmanned surveillance drones.

The Big Brother-style move will mean the public could be monitored constantly, under the pretext of a crime crack-down.

The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS) has joined forces with their English counterpart to form the Unmanned Aerial Systems Steering Group, which meets regularly to discuss the use of the planes, and reports to the Home Office.

The drones have already been tested by Strathclyde Police who used one in rescue operations in rural Argyll.

Scotland’s largest police force is keen to be at the forefront of the new technology. But pressure groups yesterday warned the step was being taken without the consent or support of the public and risked transforming Scotland into a “surveillance state”.

Alex Deanie, of Big Brother Watch, said: “It’s pretty scary that more and more police forces are considering using these.

“They invade our privacy and are being brought in without proper public consultation or support. We need a proper debate about the use of this type of surveillance and its effect on civil liberties before the police start to use these devices.”

There are two types of the military-designed drones that are being looked at by police. The first is a remote-controlled helicopter with CCTV cameras and infra red imaging built in. Flying up to 300 feet at 30mph, they are being tested by Merseyside Police.

But it is the second type that is causing the most concern – flying at 20,000 feet it is invisible to the human eye.

Patrick Harvie, leader of the Scottish Green Party, said: “Some people in the Home Office won’t be happy until they have everyone under 24-hour surveillance and every step towards that should be resisted.” Yesterday Tory justice spokesman Bill Aitken backed the plans, adding: “There are perhaps civil liberties questions, but basic and more important questions are whether or not we want to cut crime.”

Arms manufacturer BAE Systems is adapting the planes – currently used by the Army in Afghanistan – for the police forces to test. A spokesman for ACPOS yesterday said: “The steering group was set up to consider the implications for policing of such technology.”

March 30, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Israel gags news of soldier turned journalist under arrest

By Ron Kampeas · JTA · March 29, 2010

WASHINGTON — Israel has held a journalist under secret house arrest since last December based on allegations that during her military service she leaked classified documents suggesting that the Israeli army violated laws dealing with targeted killings.

Anat Kam, 23, was arrested last December and charged under Israel’s espionage and treason laws, JTA has learned. Prosecutors are seeking a 14-year sentence, which is considered severe by Israeli standards.

Mordechai Vanunu, who revealed the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons capability, was sentenced to 18 years, eventually serving the full amount.

At the time of her arrest, Kam was working as a reporter for the Israeli Internet site Walla, which was partially owned by Haaretz until last week. But the charges relate to Kam’s service in the Israeli army, when she is alleged to have photocopied sensitive documents. Bloggers have speculated that those documents served as the basis for a November 2008 Haaretz story suggesting alleged army violations. Kam has denied the charges.

Her arrest has been under a gag order in Israel, which Haaretz says it is appealing. With the gag order in place, it is impossible to know the prosecution’s reasoning for a 14-year sentence. …

Continue at source

March 30, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties | Leave a comment

Palestinian Political Prisoners

By Stephen Lendman | March 27, 2010

The numbers vary but range at any time from over 7,000 to 12,000 or more. In April 2008, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel cited 11,000, including 345 children and 98 women. Over 1,000 suffered from chronic or other diseases. Around 150 were seriously ill from heart disease, cancer, and other diseases, and 195 or more Palestinians died or were killed in prison since 1967.

As of January 2009, Adalah said about “22,500 individuals were imprisoned or detained in Israeli prisons; around 70% (or 15,750 are) Arabs.” Included are 9,735 Palestinians, nearly 80% classified as “security.” Of these, 570 were administrative detainees, uncharged by order of an administrative official, not a judge.

Another 20 were so-called “unlawful combatants” under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law (UCL), saying they’re not entitled to POW status under international law because they either took part in hostilities against Israel (directly or indirectly) or belong to a force carrying them out. No proof is needed, only “a reasonable basis for believing” the designation is accurate, and under UCL, detentions can be permanent, without trial or judicial fairness.

According to the Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, since 1967, “over 650,000 have been detained by Israel,” about 20% of the total Occupied Territory (OPT) population and 40% of the male population. Most are held in Palestine, but many thousands in Israeli civil and military prisons, in violation of numerous Fourth Geneva provisions, including Article 49 stating:

“….forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons (including prisoners) from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

This applies to OPT prisoners, most of whom are political victims of militarized oppression, or in other words, guilty of being Palestinian. In addition, Fourth Geneva states protected persons shall be detained in the occupied territory and, if convicted, serve there sentences therein.

OPT arrests and detentions come under about 1,500 military regulations for the West Bank and over 1,400 for Gaza. The IDF commander issues orders, but new ones aren’t revealed until implemented because they’re issued any time for any reason, often arbitrarily and capriciously.

Israeli prisons and military detention facilities are mainly located within Israel’s 1948 borders. They include five interrogation centers, six detention/holding facilities, three military detention camps, and about 20 prisons where OPT Palestinians are held.

A secret Facility 1391 at an unknown location is notorious for using severe torture. Gilboa Prison, north of the West Bank, is also believed to administer extreme treatment.

“The location of prisons within Israel and the transfer of detainees to locations within the occupying power’s territory are illegal under international law and constitute a war crime.”

On June 7, 1967, Military proclamation No. 1 justified them “in the interests of security and public order,” weasel words meaning anything. Since then, over 2,900 orders were issued, gravely harming Palestinians’ welfare. “These orders serve as justification every time the Israeli authorities arrest a Palestinian….”

They can be held for extended periods, interrogations lasting up to six months, during which time torture, abuse and other degrading treatment is commonplace, against the great majority in custody.

After interrogation, Palestinians can be detained administratively without charge or tried in military courts where “military orders take precedence over Israeli and international law.”

Under Military Order 1530, months may elapse between being charged and trial. The entire process is structured to deny due process and judicial fairness, unlike for most Jews in civil courts.

Activists, protesters and human rights defenders are especially at risk. In July 2008, Israeli authorities, by military order, closed the Nafha Society for the Defense of Prisoners and Human Rights. It’s one of several organizations representing Palestinian detainees in Israeli courts and advocates for them in prisons and detention centers.

Currently, Israeli security forces, politicians and extremist groups are targeting human rights groups in response to their support for the Goldstone Commission report. Among those affected are:

— B’Tselem

— Adalah

— Breaking the Silence

— the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI)

— Yesh Din

— the Centre for the Defence of the Individual

— the Public Committee Against Torture in Israeli (PACTI)

— the Israel Religious Action Centre

— Physicians for Human Rights – Israel

— Rabbis for Human Rights, and

— the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) that condemned the practice in a February 8 press release stating:

PCHR “condemns the continued persecution of international human rights defenders in the West Bank….and the deportation of international activists from the country.”

On February 7, PCHR learned that Israeli security forces entered Ramallah and al-Bireh, storming an al-Bireh apartment building and arresting Spanish journalist Ariadna Jove Marti and Australian student Bridgette Chappell. They were taken to Ofer Prison pending their deportation, citing expired visas as pretext. The two women are International Solidarity Movement activists known, according to an IDF spokesman, “for being involved in illegal riots that obstruct Israeli security operations.”

Other activists were also arrested, Israel now issuing tourist visas only to 150 selected NGOs operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders. However, they’ll be excluded from Area C under Israeli control, comprising 60% of the West Bank, thus hampering their work and imposing additional hardships on Palestinians.

PCHR condemned the action and recommends that international civil society and human rights organizations, bar associations, and international solidarity groups continue exposing suspected Israeli war criminals and pressuring their governments to prosecute them according to provisions of international law.

The extremist Netanyahu government won’t tolerate criticism or censure for its expansionist West Bank plans, including making all Jerusalem exclusively Jewish.

His cabinet introduced a Knesset bill prohibiting organizations from receiving funding from foreign political institutions unless registered with the Registrar of Political Parties.

They must then provide details about all “foreign political entity” donations, the source, amount, purpose, commitment made for its use, and more, as a way to harass and make the process more cumbersome.

The bill’s supposed purpose is to:

“increase the transparency and to correct lacunas (empty spaces or missing parts) in the law regarding the funding of political activity in Israel by foreign political entities (where such activity is defined as being) aimed at influencing public opinion in Israel or one of the branches of government in Israel regarding any element of Israel’s domestic or foreign policy.”

In fact, it’s to stifle free expression, dissent and activism, the way police states do it, how Israel always treats Palestinians, now increasingly toward outspoken Jews and international human rights organizations as well.

Conditions in Israeli Prisons

Israel willfully and systematically violates international humanitarian law, including Common Article 3 applying to the four Geneva Conventions, requiring:

“humane treatment for all persons in enemy hands, specifically prohibit(ing) murder, mutilation, torture, cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment (and) unfair trial(s).”

Fourth Geneva’s Article 4 calls “protected persons” those held by parties to a conflict or occupation “of which they are not nationals.” They must “be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention.” They’re entitled to full Fourth Geneva rights. Prisoners of war under Third Geneva have the same rights and those under Common Article 3.

Israel willfully denies them. Under the 1971 Israeli Prison Ordinance, no provision defines prisoner rights. It only provides binding rules for the Interior Minister who can interpret them freely by administrative decree. For example, it’s legal to intern 20 inmates in a cell as small as five meters long, four meters wide and three meters high, including an open lavatory, and they can be confined there up to 23 hours daily.

An April 2009 PCHR press release said thousands of Palestinians “continue to suffer in Israeli jails” under horrific conditions, including:

— severe overcrowding;

— poor ventilation and sanitation;

— no change of clothes or adequate clothing;

— sleeping on wooden planks with thin mattresses, some infested with vermin; blankets are often torn, filthy and inadequate; hot water is rare and soap is rationed;

— at the Negev Ketziot military detention camp, threadbare tents are used, exposing detainees to extreme weather conditions; in summer, vermin, insects, scorpions, parasites, rats, and other reptiles are a major problem;

— Megiddo and Ofer also use tents; in addition, Ofer uses oil-soiled hangers;

— for some, isolation in tiny, poorly ventilated solitary confinement with no visitation rights or contact with counsel or other prisoners;

— no access to personal cleanliness and hygiene; toilet facilities are restricted, forcing prisoners to urinate in bottles in their cells;

— inadequate food in terms of quality, quantity, and dietary requirements;

— poor medical care, including lack of specialized personnel, mental health treatment, and denial of needed medicines and equipment; as a result, many suffer ill health; doctors are also pressured to deny proper treatment, some later admitting it;

— extreme psychological pressure to break detainees’ will;

— widespread use of torture, abuse, cruel and degrading treatment;

— women and children are treated the same as men;

— NGOs like Physicians for Human Rights – Israel and the ICRC are deterred from aiding detainees;

— denied or hindered access to family members and counsel;

— imposed conditions link visits:

“with the overall security situation, requiring that prisoners must not be security prisoners and that persons applying for visits must not have a security record, requiring that visitors be first-degree relatives and that brothers or sons applying for visits must be under the age of 18.”

Treatment of Gazans Arrested During and After Operation Cast Lead

On January 28, 2009, a complaint to Israel’s Military Judge Advocate General, Brigadier General Avichai Mandelblit, by seven Israeli human rights organizations, cited degrading and appalling conditions in which detainees, including minors, were held.

Before transfer to the Israel Prison Service, they were held for many hours or days in pits dug in the ground, handcuffed and blindfolded, under extreme weather conditions. No sanitation was provided and limited amounts of food. Some, in fact, were held in combat areas, in violation of international law prohibiting their exposure to danger.

After removal from pits, some were held overnight in a truck, handcuffed, with one blanket for two people in winter. Others were kept for extended periods in the rain with little food or water. Incidents of extreme violence and humiliation were also reported that continued after prison transfers.

Legal Department Director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI), Bana Shoughry-Badarne, said:

“Israel’s indifference to its moral and legal obligations to detainees is particularly objectionable in view of the fact” that the IDF completely ignored “the basic rights of the detainees and captives” under international law, violations committed against every detainee held.

Since July 2007, Gazan families have been denied access to their relatives in Israeli prisons. Non-Israeli Palestinian lawyers can’t represent them in military courts. Travel restrictions impede all lawyers. Meetings with their clients aren’t confidential, and most prisoners have no access to an attorney.

In 2006, B’Tselem issued a report titled, “Barred from Contact: Violation of the Right to Visit Palestinians Held in Israeli Prisons,” citing obstacles families face to visit their relatives. They include difficulties obtaining required permits and “grueling journeys” of up to 24 hours, the result of long distances through numerous checkpoints plus delays.

This “arbitrary and disproportionate policy not only infringes the right to family visits, it also results in violation of other rights and principles of international humanitarian and human rights law, as well as domestic Israeli law.”

In January 2010, Adalah addressed the same issue stating:

On December 9, 2009, “Israel’s Supreme Court (HCJ) decided that the state has no obligation to allow family visits for Gazans detained in Israel.” Writer Grietje Baars, a UK lawyer, said the HCJ rejected petitions by detainees, their relatives and Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, claiming that “Israel’s rights as a sovereign state” lets it deny “foreigners” entry in violation of international law – a clear act of persecution.

Under Article 7(g) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (HCJ), crimes against humanity include:

“Persecution (meaning) the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity.”

In a previous decision, the HCJ held that:

“It is a firmly established precept that the human rights to which a person is entitled simply by being human remain even when he is detained or imprisoned, and the fact that he is incarcerated cannot serve to deprive him of any right.”

Denying them defies that ruling, and the fact that hundreds of Gazan detainees in Israel are held indefinitely without trial, are in virtual isolation, and can only send their families occasional messages through ICRC representatives.

Petitioners call banning visits “collective punishment” under Fourth Geneva’s Article 33 stating:

“No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties….are prohibited.”

Doing so (along with torture and other forms of abuse) aims to break their spirit to get them to cooperate or confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

Baars concluded:

“Aside from the right to have their rights hououred and protected, and to live their lives in dignity and freedom, the Gazans and the Palestinians in general, have the right to an effective judicial remedy. Without domestic enforcement of international law, the onus is on the international community to fulfill these rights and uphold the rule of law, internationally, for the benefit of all.”

The international community’s failure to comply with international law lets Israel violate its provisions freely. Unless changed, Israel’s lawlessness will continue unchecked, a no longer to be tolerated grim prospect.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com

March 27, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Leave a comment

In West Bank Palestinian Childhood Is Cut Short – It’s the Law

March 27th, 2010 | by Carol Sanders

Palestinian child arrested

In the West Bank, there is a two-tiered system of justice, including for minors.  For settler children, justice is administered according to Israeli domestic law, with all the due process protections that affords.  They  cannot be  charged as adults until they reach 18, in accordance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory.  For Palestinian children, military law applies, and that  pretty much means due process, and the  tenderness of their years,  is irrelevant.   Their childhood itself is cut short, both by the circumstances of the Occupation and the letter of military law.  Until recently, they could be charged as adults as young as 12 years of age.  A recent military order “reformed” that anomaly by setting their age of majority at 16 –still two years earlier than their settler counterparts, and two years younger than required by the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  But the reality is that children as young as 12 continue to be arrested and imprisoned in adult military jails.  In the majority of cases the soldiers who arrest them say that the children were throwing stones, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Defence of Children International-Palestine reports that arrests of children have been increasing .  Presently approximately  350 West Bank children under 17 are being held in Israeli prisons.   Defence of Children provides testimonies of the children, detailing the brutal circumstances of their detention and interrogation, and their confinement with adult prisoners.  Urgent appeals on behalf of the children are issued by Defence of Children, including in the case of masse arrests (17 children taken in a night raid from Al Jalazun Refugee Camp near Ramallah), and the  transfer of children to prisons within Israel, where family members cannot visit because of restrictions on movement of people under Israel’s military Occupation.

Related posts:

  1. Palestinian Child Released on Bail After Nine Days in Military Prison
  2. Palestinian Child, 12 years old, To Be Tried as Adult By Israeli Military Court
  3. Israeli Schoolchildren Learn to Count with Tanks

March 27, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

The horrible prospect of Supreme Court Justice Cass Sunstein

By Glenn Greenwald | March 26, 2010

A media consensus has emerged that the retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the 90-year-old Ford-appointee who became the leader of the Court’s so-called “liberal wing,” is now imminent.  The New York Times‘ Peter Baker has an article today on Obama’s leading candidates to replace Stevens, in which one finds this strange passage:

The president’s base hopes he will name a full-throated champion to counter Justice Antonin Scalia, the most forceful conservative on the bench. . . . The candidates who would most excite the left include the constitutional scholars Harold Hongju Koh, Cass R. Sunstein and Pamela S. Karlan.

While that’s probably true of Koh and Karlan, it’s absolutely false with regard to Sunstein, who is currently Obama’s Chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  From the beginning of the War on Terror, Cass Sunstein turned himself into one of the most reliable Democratic cheerleaders for Bush/Cheney radicalism and their assault on the Constitution and the rule of law.

In 2002, at the height of controversy over Bush’s creation of military commissions without Congressional approval, Sunstein stepped forward to insist that “[u]nder existing law, President George W. Bush has the legal authority to use military commissions” and that “President Bush’s choice stands on firm legal ground.” Sunstein scorned as “ludicrous” the argument from Law Professor George Fletcher that the Supreme Court would find Bush’s military commissions without any legal basis.  Four years later — in its Hamdan ruling — the Supreme Court, with Justice Stevens in the majority, held that Bush lacked the legal authority to create military commissions without approval from Congress, i.e., the Court (and Stevens) found Bush lacked exactly the “legal authority” which Sunstein vehemently insisted he possessed.  Had Sunstein been on the Court then instead of Stevens, that decision presumably would have come out the opposite way:  in favor of Bush’s sweeping claims of executive authority.

Worse still, in 2005, Sunstein became the hero of the Bush-following Right when, in the wake of revelations that the Bush administration was illegally eavesdropping on Americans, he quickly proclaimed that Bush was within his legal rights to spy without warrants in violation of FISA.  Sunstein defended Bush’s NSA program by embracing the two extremist arguments at the core of Bush/Cheney lawlessness:  that (1) the AUMF silently authorized warrantless eavesdropping in violation of FISA and, worse, (2)  the President may have a plausible claim that Article II “inherently” authorizes warrantless eavesdropping regardless of what a statute says.

In a March, 2006 Washington Post article, Sunstein solidified his credential as Leading Democratic-Law-Professor/Bush-Defender by mocking the notion that Bush had committed crimes while in office:

[Harvard Law Professor Laurence] Tribe wrote [Rep. John] Conyers, dismissing Bush’s defense of warrantless surveillance as “poppycock.” It constituted, Tribe concluded, “as grave an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having studied.”

But posed against this bill of aggrievement are legal and practical realities. Not all scholars, even of a liberal bent, agree that Bush has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Bush’s legal advice may be wrong, they say, but still reside within the bounds of reason.

“The Clinton impeachment was plainly unconstitutional, and a Bush impeachment would be nearly as bad,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. “There is a very good argument that the president had it wrong on WMD in Iraq but that he was acting in complete good faith.”

Sunstein argues that Bush’s decision to conduct surveillance of Americans without court approval flowed from Congress’s vote to allow an armed struggle against al-Qaeda. “If you can kill them, why can’t you spy on them?” Sunstein said, adding that this is a minority view.

In 2008, Sunstein became the leading proponent of the Bush/Cheney-sponsored bill to legalize Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program and to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, a bill which Obama — advised by Sunstein — ended up voting for in violation of his pledge to filibuster.  The same year, Sunstein provoked widespread anger among progressives by insisting (again) that investigations and prosecutions of Bush officials would be inappropriate and harmful.  As summarized by Talk Left’s Armando, a long-time lawyer:  “Cass Sunstein has been defending the Bush Administration’s illegal actions and the Bush Administration’s preposterous claims for many many years now. This is who he is.”  Hey, Left:  doesn’t the thought of Supreme Court Justice Cass Sunstein make you tingle with “excitement,” just as Peter Baker said?

Even in domestic policy, Sunstein is far away from “the Left.”  As Matt Yglesias put it last April after Obama nominated him to be head of White House regulatory policy:  his “views on regulation are, if anything, somewhat more conservative than those of most Democrats.”  In reviewing Sunstein’s domestic policy book, Nudge, Matt Stoller pointed out that several of his ideas are “exactly 100% out of the conventional wisdom from the 1960s conservative movement,” that he steadfastly exempts the Pentagon and the Surveillance State from claims that the Government is too large, and even holds up Rahm Emanuel as a “liberal,” just to give a sense of how Sunstein views the political spectrum.  As I discussed earlier this year, Sunstein also proposed a consummately creepy plan for the government to “cognitively infiltrate” online discussions which spout views that Sunstein deems false.

Along with TNR‘s Jeffrey Rosen, it was Sunstein who took a leading role in telling Democrats that John Roberts was a good choice for the Court.  While Rosen has acknowledged he was wrong in his assessment — because Roberts turned out to be exactly the judicial radical which liberals said he was (while Rosen/Sunstein derided liberals for saying so) — Sunstein continued to praise Roberts and Sam Alito for their rulings.  A former student of Sunstein’s at Chicago Law School, the very smart liberal blogger Kathy G, detailed Sunstein’s record in a comprehensive post, including his expressed affection and admiration for the executive-power-loving radicals of the Federalist Society which, among other things, produced John Yoo (she also notes Sunstein’s view that Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided,” though he doesn’t favor its overruling).  As she aptly put it:

I think Sunstein is an extremely ambitious man who basically would run over his own grandmother for a seat on the Supreme Court (well, he’d think seriously about doing so, anyway). Seeing how powerful the right wing has been in this country (at least until recently), especially regarding the courts, Sunstein must know that if he wants to be a Supreme Court justice, it would help if he were cozy with the right and accepted many of their basic ideas (such as judicial “minimalism,” which he has advocated), albeit with a more centrist spin. It obviously would also help his popularity with the right if he were to refrain from bruising conservatives’ tender feelings by pointing out such inconvenient truths as the fact that the current administration is a pack of dangerous, despotic war criminals.

Indeed, for all of these reasons, Sunstein has been praised by the Right as one of Obama’s best picks while consistently opposed by “the Left.”

Given all this, I have no idea what would possibly lead Baker to claim that Sunstein would be a favorite choice of the Left for the Court, though I can guess:  the fact that the incoherent Glenn Beck — for some inexplicable reason — has made Sunstein a prime target of his deranged rantings about The Imminent Takeover of Leninism leads Baker to believe that Sunstein must be beloved by the Left.  He most assuredly is not.  Ironically, with this administration and in our political culture, the perception that a Sunstein appointment would “excite the Left” is probably the best way to ensure he is not chosen for the Court, as nothing is more fatal in Washington than being viewed as Liked by the Left.  Just ask Dawn Johnsen about that, if you can find her (indeed, reflecting How Washington Works, Baker immediately says of the candidates he identifies as The Left’s Favorites:  “insiders doubt Mr. Obama would pick any of them now”).  So it’s arguably productive to let this view of Sunstein stand, as false as it is.

The person who many believe is the leading candidate to replace Stevens — Obama’s Solicitor General Elena Kagan — has a record that is almost as bad as Sunstein’s when it comes to executive power abuses, civil liberties, and “War on Terror” radicalism.  Unlike the Sotomayor-for-Souter substitution, which essentially maintained the Court’s balance, replacing Stevens with the likes of Cass Sunstein or Elena Kagan would move the Court dramatically to the Right, especially in the areas of executive power and civil liberties, where a fragile 5-4 majority has provided at least some minimal safeguards over the last decade.  Whatever else one might want to say about Cass Sunstein — or, for that matter, Elena Kagan — it is simply false to claim that they would fit within the so-called “liberal” wing of the Court on matters of executive power and civil liberties.  The replacement of John Paul Stevens could have a very radical impact on the Supreme Court, and it’s certainly not too early to begin combating pernicious myths about the leading candidates.

March 26, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

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