American Lawyers Defending the Constitution

Please forward this post, the FireDogLake post, or the American Freedom Campaign site address to every lawyer you know.

If you are a lawyer or a student of law, you can follow the link at the end of this post to add your signature.

(If this campaign is successful, maybe next we can get physicians and medical students organized to demand universal health care! I can dream, can't I?)

~ glassfrequency

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via looseheadprop @ FireDogLake:

We, the undersigned lawyers in the United States, have been inspired by the many lawyers in Pakistan who have risked their own liberty and careers in an effort to preserve their nation's freedoms.

Their courage has deepened our own resolve to defend the rule of law in our nation. As lawyers, we have both a moral and professional responsibility to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States.

To that end, we are committed to creating a movement of lawyers in this nation dedicated to monitoring and, when appropriate, challenging the actions of our government when those actions threaten our nation's freedoms.

As our initial act, we are issuing the following statement to the U.S. House and Senate Judiciary Committees, urging hearings into the unconstitutional and possibly criminal actions of the Bush Administration.

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Message to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers
and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy
from American Lawyers Defending the Constitution

We are lawyers in the United States of America. As such, we have all taken an oath obligating us to defend the Constitution and the rule of law from those who would violate and subvert them, and to hold wrongdoers accountable.

We believe the Bush administration has committed numerous offenses against the Constitution and may have violated federal laws. Evidence exists that it has illegally spied on Americans, tortured and abused men and women in its direct custody, sent others to be tortured by countries like Syria and Egypt, and kept people in prison indefinitely with no chance to challenge the bases of their detention. Moreover, the administration has blatantly defied congressional subpoenas, obstructing constitutional oversight of the executive branch.

Thus, we call on House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy to launch hearings into the possibility that crimes have been committed by this administration in violation of the Constitution, federal statutes, and international treaties. We call for the investigations to go where they must, including into the offices of the President and the Vice President. Should these hearings demonstrate that laws have in fact been broken by this administration, we support all such legal and congressional actions necessary to ensure the survival of our Constitution and the nation we love.


SIGN HERE


photo: K.M.Chaudary, AP

severe interrogation techniques

from Mark Mazzetti
The New York Times
[excerpt]

President Bush “has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday,” the chief White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said today.

As to whether there would be investigation by the Justice Department, Ms. Perino said: “I know that the C.I.A. Director is gathering facts and our White House Counsel’s Office is supporting them in that. Whether or not there is going to be an investigation to that scale will have to be determined by others.”

She said President Bush has “complete confidence” in General Hayden.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects— including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody— to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.

Democrats Call for Inquiry in Destruction of Tapes by C.I.A.

photo source

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ALSO:

CIA Destroyed Videos Showing Interrogations
Dan Eggen / Joby Warrick
The Washington Post

Hayden Says CIA Videotapes Destroyed
Pamela Hess
The Associated Press

spread the word

from digby:
[excerpt]

I realize that it's impolite and impolitic to publicly excoriate intellectuals and policy experts who make huge mistakes like the Iraq war. I would imagine it makes relationships in the workplace and social circles quite unpleasant. But unless some standard is created and enforced, people will take advantage of the fact that nobody is ever held liable and will just keep doing this stuff for their own ends.

And their friends in the Village media will nearly always go along because according to their he said/she said construct, they have no obligation to ever sort out truth from lies. Each issue or policy question exists in its own vacuum. Therefore, credibility is irrelevant.

In this case it's patently obvious to anyone who's given even a perfunctory look at this, that the bloodthirsty neoconservatives have a track record over 30 years of exaggerating threats. It's what they do. Iraq was the first big time shooting war they actually achieved --- and look what happened. The intelligence services are far from perfect, and their assessments are hardly holy writ, but the neocons are completely and wholly lacking in credibility and honesty. They should never be taken seriously by anyone again.

Olbermann - December 6, 2007

from Dan Froomkin: A Pattern of Deception
[excerpts]

Here's Bush on Jan. 26:

"As you know, the Iranians, for example, think they want to have a nuclear weapon. And we've convinced other nations to join us to send a clear message, through the United Nations, that that's unacceptable behavior."

On March 31:

"Our position is that we would hope that nations would be very careful in dealing with Iran, particularly since Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, and a major threat to world peace is if the Iranians had a nuclear weapon. . . .

"We respect the history of Iran, we respect the rich traditions of Iran. We, however, are deeply concerned about an Iranian government that is in violation of international accords in their attempt to develop a nuclear weapon."

On June 5:

"The Iranians are a great people who deserve to chart their own future, but they are denied their liberty by a handful of extremists whose pursuit of nuclear weapons prevents their country from taking its rightful place amongst the thriving."

On June 19:

Bush spoke of "consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon, such as financial sanctions, or economic sanctions. . . "Now, whether or not they abandon their nuclear weapons program, we'll see."

On July 12:

"The same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map is also providing sophisticated IEDs to extremists in Iraq who are using them to kill American soldiers."

On Aug. 6:

"It's up to Iran to prove to the world that they're a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force. After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon."


From that point on, he started choosing his words more carefully.

On Aug. 9: "They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program. That, in itself, coupled with their stated foreign policy, is very dangerous for world stability. . . . It's a very troubling nation right now."

But it certainly didn't tame the overall message.

On Aug. 28: "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust."

"We seek an Iran whose government is accountable to its people -- instead of to leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons."

On Oct. 4: "I have made the commitment that I would continue to work with the world to speak with one voice to the Iranians, to the Iranian government, that we will work in ways that we can to make it clear to you that you should not have the know-how on how to make a weapon, because one of the great threats to peace and the world would be if Iranians showed up with a nuclear weapon."

At his Oct. 17 press conference:

Q: "But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?"

Bush: "I think so long -- until they suspend and/or make it clear that they -- that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace."

"But this -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."


MORE

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Recall the 2004 State for the Union address regarding Iraq's
"Weapons of Mass Destruction program-related activities”

~ glassfrequency

Dear John,

Avedon Carol on the "I" word:
[the juicy bits]

It turns out that Conyers, too, has 2008 disease. He sees it as so important that a Democrat should be elected to the White House - so important that a Republican be kept out - that not even saving the Constitution is worth risking that. And why does he think it's a risk? He thinks that impeachment would create sympathy for Bush.

Impeachment created sympathy for Clinton, it's true. Because everyone could see that it was wrong. The Republicans had nothing on him, and instead chose to try to wreck Clinton's marriage and publicly humiliate some intern because they felt like it, and they began impeachment hearings that two-thirds of the country opposed.

Well, two-thirds of the country does not oppose impeachment of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney. In fact, a majority of Americans believe Bush and Cheney have committed numerous impeachable offenses and at the very least should be investigated for them, and impeached if the case is proven. Even something like a third of Republicans think they are criminals. And for most Democrats, it isn't even a question.

Conyers has been infected by the same madness that has corrupted the rest of the party, it seems. He's not on the take, he doesn't want any part of the Republican program, but he's surrounded by an overwhelming meme war run by GOP operatives who have convinced everyone on the Hill that impeachment of Bush/Cheney would exactly parallel the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

It's a lie. In the rest of the world, everyone knows they are entirely different things. People liked Bill Clinton and they didn't care about his sex life. They thought Starr and the Republicans were out of line because they were.

But people despise Cheney, and even a significant chunk of those who voted for Bush are now completely disgusted with him. They know these guys are wrecking our country and possibly the world. They understand that they're criminals. Impeachment hearings will only highlight the depths of their depravity.

What's there to have sympathy for? Illegal war? The murder of a million people who never threatened us? Torture? Contempt for our Constitution?

the whole thing

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If you're not reading The Sideshow every day, you're not keeping up. Best summary of what's being written- every day. And I'm not just saying that because she occasionally links to me (thanks!). An amazing blog. More than a blog, really. An attitude. A lifestyle. I want to be Avedon Carol. Go there now!

~ from all of us at snow-moon



(ok, there's only one of me- but group blogs are all the rage these days...)

Corruption & Cholera

Chris Floyd writes:

In a remarkably short amount of time, the conventional wisdom of America's media-political class has embraced the idea that George W. Bush's escalation of the Iraq war in 2007 has been a success.

This highly dubious notion- based on nothing but the fact that the horrific murder rate spawned by Bush's act of aggression has momentarily abated to previous levels of savagery that were once considered catastrophic- now serves as the basic assumption of the debate about the Iraq war, especially among the punditry and out on the campaign trail.

But on the ground in Iraq, where some good reporting still filters through the white noise machine of the corporate media, the picture is much different.

READ: EATING IRAQ

[photo source]

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another crazy conspiracy theory becomes fact

the aristocrats

Philip E. Agre writes:

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

READ: What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

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via digby who has this to say

lock 'em up

from Ben Wallace-Wells / Rolling Stone
[excerpt]

The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war.

For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States," he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible.

How America Lost the War on Drugs