Articles filed under Law

Harpers
Scooter Libby is not the only confidant of President Bush who is apparently above the law. There’s also Karl Rove. Now Rove serves as a senior presidential advisor and in this capacity he has been given a very high level national security clearance, allowing him to examine and hold classified and highly sensitive documents. Of course, this is the same Karl Rove who, as we now know thanks to the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, used his access to classified information to out a covert CIA agent to reporters, hoping it would be published.

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Huffington Post
Tough enough to execute Karla Fay Tucker -- and then laugh about it. Tough enough to sign a death warrant for a man whose lawyer slept through the trial -- and then snicker when asked about it in a debate. Even tough enough to execute a great-grandmother who murdered her husband -- after he abused her. A friend of mine at the time asked Bush to commute her sentence, telling him, "Betty Lou ain't a threat to no one she ain't married to." No dice.

Mr. Bush is tough enough to invade a country that was no risk to America, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and shedding precious American blood in the process. Tough enough to sanction torture. Tough enough to order an American citizen arrested and held without trial.

But if you're rich and right-wing and Republican, George is a real softie.

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Seattle PI
President Bush's commutation of a pal's prison sentence counts as a most shocking act of disrespect for the U.S. justice system. It's the latest sign of the huge repairs to American concepts of the rule of law that await the next president.

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The Nation
It's appropriate.

The president who led the nation into a disastrous war in Iraq by peddling false statements and misrepresentations has come to the rescue of a White House aide convicted of lying by commuting his sentence.

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Huffington Post
My, what a clever boy he thought he would be. He wouldn't pardon Libby: oh no, that would be repeating Gerry Ford's Nixon mistake, and who'd want to risk that? Nah, he'd commute the sentence, that's the ticket. The base would cheer, the libs would scream (don't they always?), and the media would praise him as prudent, as searching for common ground, putting our long national nightmare behind us the right way, not the wimp way.

But I think most Americans will see this move for what it actually is: jury nullification, cronyism, Cheney puppeteering.

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New York Times
When he was running for president, George W. Bush loved to contrast his law-abiding morality with that of President Clinton, who was charged with perjury and acquitted. For Mr. Bush, the candidate, "politics, after a time of tarnished ideals, can be higher and better."

Not so for Mr. Bush, the president. Judging from his decision today to commute the 30-month sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was charged with perjury and convicted, untarnished ideals are less of a priority than protecting the secrets of his inner circle and mollifying the tiny slice of right-wing Americans left in his political base.

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TPM
Just got off the phone with Joe Wilson, whose exposure of the hollowness of the Niger-Iraq uranium claim set in motion the chain of events that led to Scooter Libby's perjury and, today, his sentence's commutation by President Bush. Wilson -- who is pursuing a civil suit against Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney -- called on Bush and Cheney to release the transcripts of their interviews with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "to let the American people know what they knew and when they knew it." If not, Wilson says, "Congress should hold hearings on the president's role in the obstruction of justice."

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Huffington Post
Man, Cheney's "Go Fuck Yourself" insult has crazy staying power. You can use it for just about anything. Which is probably the same way George Bush feels about the U.S. Constitution. He can use it for anything.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 2 — President Bush said today that he had used his power of clemency to commute the 30-month sentence for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of perjury in March and was due to begin serving his time within weeks.

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Slate
The Supreme Court's decision in last week's school desegregation cases represents the culmination of a 50-year-old debate about the meaning and content of Brown v. Board of Education. The conservatives have now taken over Brown, no question.

Justices in the majority—like the new chief justice, John Roberts, and Justice Clarence Thomas—can invoke Brown for the proposition that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prevents states from treating individuals differently on the basis of race. They invoke the mantra of the "color-blind Constitution" to strike down voluntary school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky.

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Boston Globe
MIAMI --Defense lawyers for Jose Padilla chipped away Monday at the credibility of the government's expert witness, who said he could not disclose details about some of his work because of secrecy agreements with unnamed foreign governments.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --A federal appeals court refused on Monday to step in and delay former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence in the CIA leak case.

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AlterNet
President Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to coin the phrase "executive privilege," but not the first to invoke its principle: namely, that a president has the right to withhold certain information from Congress, the courts or anyone else — even when faced with a subpoena. Executive privilege, though, is a murky and mysterious concept. Here, an attempt to clarify the murk.

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Los Angeles Times
THE SUPREME COURT has obligations both to society and to the law. In its end-of-term rush last week, it served neither well, shirking its duties in rulings that undermined free speech, made it easier for a president to violate the Constitution's prohibition against funding religion and transformed the meaning of the 20th century's most important case, Brown vs. the Board of Education, from a call to an integrated society into a bar against that goal.

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The Nation
Chief Justice John Roberts's astonishing claim in the Supreme Court's final ruling of the term, that he is "faithful to the heritage" of Brown v. Board of Education--while explicitly invalidating desegregation programs based on race--shows not just how far the Court has swung to the right but the profound corruption of ideas and language that motivate the Court's activist, conservative bloc.

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AlterNet
Vice President Dick Cheney has regularly claimed that he is above the law, but until recently he has not offered any explanation of why.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a law that Cheney believes does apply to him, whether that law be major and minor.

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New York Times
It is extremely disturbing that Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, was hauled off to jail this week. There is reason to believe his prosecution may have been a political hit, intended to take out the state’s most prominent Democrat, a serious charge that has not been adequately investigated. The appeals court that hears his case should demand answers, as should Congress.

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Los Angeles Times
THE SUPREME COURT term that ended Thursday confirmed exactly what many people had feared: that the testimony given by John Roberts and Samuel Alito at their confirmation hearings just months earlier was a lot of baloney.

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Washington Post
Just say no.

The Senate's Democratic majority -- joined by all Republicans who purport to be moderate -- must tell President Bush that this will be their answer to any controversial nominee to the Supreme Court or the appellate courts.

The Senate should refuse even to hold hearings on Bush's next Supreme Court choice, should a vacancy occur, unless the president reaches agreement with the Senate majority on a mutually acceptable list of nominees.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 28 — Striking down an antitrust rule nearly a century old, the Supreme Court ruled today that it is no longer automatically unlawful for manufacturers and distributors to agree on setting minimum retail prices.

The decision will give producers significantly more leeway, though not unlimited power, to dictate retail prices and to restrict the flexibility of discounters.

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The Nation
No one was all that surprised when the Bush administration announced Thursday that it would not cooperate with congressional demands for documents and testimony by prominent former officials that would likely confirm this White House's reckless disregard for the rule of law.

What was surprising, and encouraging, was the decisiveness with which key players in Congress responded.

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Rolling Stone
In a 5-4 decision that justice Breyer declares “threatens the promise of Brown”, the Roberts court has blocked school integration plans in Seattle and Kentucky.

I’ve been holding out hope that Chief Justice Roberts was not one of the circular logic jerkoff lawyers the adminstration is crawling with.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — A closely divided Supreme Court on Thursday narrowed the ability of public school districts to use race in assigning students to schools.

Affirmative action in education survives but with tighter restrictions following the decisions in two related cases from Kentucky and Washington. Districts in Louisville and Seattle, hoping to maintain diversity, considered race when deciding what schools students can attend.

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ABC News
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a landmark sex discrimination decision 11 years ago striking down men-only admission policies at the Virginia Military Institute, her husband, Marty, proudly hung The New York Times' front-page story trumpeting the ruling on his office door.

Times have changed.

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ABC News
The slammer is getting slammed -- with an increase in inmates.

The nation's inmate population is at an all-time high, and has seen its largest year-to-year increase in six years, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report.

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CounterPunch
Today marks the first oversight hearing on the federal death penalty that the Senate Judiciary Committee has held in six years. Until recently, Congress has asked few questions about how the federal death penalty is being implemented, and we received little information as a result. Indeed, it is fitting that we will hear from some of the same organizations that testified at that last hearing in June 2001. That is because in some respects, we know little more today than we did six years ago.

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New York Times
The Supreme Court hit the trifecta yesterday: Three cases involving the First Amendment. Three dismaying decisions by Chief Justice John Roberts’s new conservative majority.

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Washington Post
THREE TERMS and a different Supreme Court ago, a five-justice majority sensibly upheld a provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law designed to stem the flood of corporate- and labor-funded campaign commercials masquerading as "issue ads." The majority found "little difference" between "an ad that urged viewers to 'vote against Jane Doe' and one that condemned Jane Doe's record on a particular issue before exhorting viewers to 'call Jane Doe and tell her what you think.' " As the court explained, "although the resulting advertisements do not urge the viewer to vote for or against a candidate in so many words, they are no less clearly intended to influence the election."

Yesterday, a changed court, without acknowledging that it was doing so, jettisoned that common-sense approach.

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Los Angeles Times
MONDAY WAS a rocky day for the 1st Amendment, and the Supreme Court did not limit its mischief to the speech clause. A smaller, more technical case threatens to undermine the amendment's protection of religion from government intrusion, in this case by limiting the ways taxpayers may challenge government spending on faith.

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Los Angeles Times
MONTGOMERY, ALA. — As Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama, goes before a federal judge today to fight a recommended 30-year prison sentence, he's telling anyone who'll listen that his prosecution was engineered by White House strategist Karl Rove.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that ordinary taxpayers cannot challenge a White House initiative that helps religious charities get a share of federal money.
The 5-4 decision blocks a lawsuit by a group of atheists and agnostics against eight Bush administration officials including the head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Other court rulings:

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Harpers
A key aspect of the legal architecture of the “war on terror” crafted by the Bush Administration involves labeling all persons seized and held as “terrorist detainees” (look at the telling language used in the letter from Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker, published in this space yesterday, for instance). Under the laws of war, a person seized on the battlefield is presumed to be a lawful combatant and as such entitled to prisoner of war treatment pursuant to article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention. This status can be overturned by a process of administrative review in which a determination is made that the person is not a lawful combatant in which case the detainee has protections under article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions. However, the Bush Administration decided to turn this system on its head, introducing the fiction that “the president” had made the determination that every person seized was an “unlawful enemy combatant.” There was no need for specific evidence or facts about the persons seized. It was conclusively presumed. Of course we subsequently learned that over 80% of the persons held at Guantánamo had nothing to do with al Qaeda, or any other terrorist group. For the most part they were seized so that their captors could avail themselves of a bounty payment that the Pentagon very foolishly began offering for prisoners early in the war.

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New York Times
President Bush is notorious for issuing statements taking exception to hundreds of bills as he signs them. This week, we learned that in a shocking number of cases, the Bush administration has refused to enact those laws. Congress should use its powers to insist that its laws are obeyed.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and corporate lobbyists long have sought sweeping "tort reform" to limit lawsuits and massive jury awards — without much success. But in the last year, they quietly have been winning much of what they've wanted on a case-by-case basis in the Supreme Court.

With a week to go in their term, the justices have handed down a dozen rulings that sharply limit the damages that can be won in lawsuits or make it harder to sue corporations.

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Harpers
No one has captured George W. Bush’s understanding of constitutional law more precisely or presciently than Richard M. Nixon, who famously (and incorrectly) told David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Many hoped this theory had seen its definitive demise with Nixon’s own fall, but Bush and his compatriots clearly have a different view—

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 19 — Lawmakers say they plan to dig deeper into the Bush administration’s use of bill-signing statements as ways to circumvent Congressional intent.

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Washington Post
New evidence unearthed by House Democrats establishes that White House political adviser Karl Rove and many of his colleagues used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business -- even though White House policy is clear that doing so is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

How did such casual lawbreaking come to be so widespread? And why was it tolerated? Those are among the questions the White House has yet to answer satisfactorily.

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Harpers
In the Framers’ Constitution, after Congress passes a law and sends it to the President for signature, the president has the right either to sign the bill into law, or to veto it, in which case it can still become law if it receives the proper extraordinary two-thirds majority in the House and Senate. In the Cheney-Addington Constitution, the President is simply entitled to sign the bill, and issue a statement in which he tailors it exactly as he wishes – making amendments and changes as it suits him. These emendations are either done secretly or they are contained in a Signing Statement issued by the president at the time he signs the bill. You might call this entire process a secret amendment of the Constitution.

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Washington Post
President Bush has asserted that he is not necessarily bound by the bills he signs into law, and yesterday a congressional study found multiple examples in which the administration has not complied with the requirements of the new statutes.

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AlterNet
Well, it's official: President Bush doesn't much respect the laws Congress passes. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report -- commissioned by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and released today -- confirms that Bush's use of presidential signing statements are, in fact, utterly without precedent.

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TPM
Email messages sent by White House officials using Republican National Committee addresses have been extensively destroyed, according to an early report on the ongoing investigation released today by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

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Think Progress
The Office of Special Counsel, which has already recommended that GSA chief Lurita Doan be suspended or fired for participating in partisan activities while on the job, is now moving forward with its investigation of nearly 20 other administration agencies.

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Los Angeles Times
TODAY MARKS the 35th anniversary of one of the most famous and most misunderstood events in modern American history: the break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972. The break-in set off a chain of events known as "Watergate," which led ultimately to Richard Nixon's forced resignation as president — and which is also misunderstood. For history's sake, it's important to set these things straight.

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OpEd News
Condoleezza Rice is refusing to comply with a subpoena to appear before Congress. The Justice Department is refusing to produce subpoenaed documents. Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor will almost certainly refuse to comply with subpoenas to appear. Dick Cheney has said that if he is subpoenaed he will not testify. Karl Rove has made his refusal to obey the law so clear that Congressional Committees that have approved subpoenas for him are afraid to actually issue them. The White House has shamelessly indicated that it does not intend to start obeying any of these subpoenas anytime soon.

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Washington Post
President Bush's profoundly un-American notion that he can arrest and indefinitely hold people without trial if he simply designates them "enemy combatants" ran afoul of the judicial branch yesterday.

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Washington Post
The U.S. special counsel has called on President Bush to discipline General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan "to the fullest extent" for violating the federal Hatch Act when she allegedly asked political appointees how they could "help our candidates" during a January meeting.

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New York Times
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled yesterday that the president may not declare civilians in this country to be “enemy combatants” and have the military hold them indefinitely. The ruling was a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism.

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New York Times
For years, President Bush has made the grandiose claim that the Congressional authorization to attack Afghanistan after 9/11 was a declaration of a “war on terror” that gave him the power to decide who the combatants are and throw them into military prisons forever.

Yesterday, in a powerful 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit utterly rejected the president’s claims.

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Christian Science Monitor
Washington - What's in a word? When the word is "unlawful," quite a lot.

Early in June, in another major setback for the Bush administration's beleaguered military commissions, military judges in two trials declared that they lacked jurisdiction to try terror suspects detained at Guantánamo Bay.

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Washington Post
The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

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MSNBC
The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - President Bush is signing up legal help as he girds for battle with the Democratic-led Congress.

Faced with a flurry of document requests and expanding congressional investigations, the White House announced Friday that Bush had hired nine lawyers, including five who'll fill new jobs in the president's legal office. The recruits have solid experience in white-collar crime, government investigations and constitutional law.

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The Nation
Do you know how much your colleagues earn? I thought not. You probably know more about your co-workers' sex lives than you do about what's in their pay envelopes. Unless they volunteer the information, or leave their pay stubs lying out on their desk, it can take years to learn that someone else is being paid more than you for the same work, if you ever do. My lucky break came decades ago at another magazine when I was inadvertently mailed someone else's check. How often do the postal gods help out a worker like that?

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Washington Post
THE BUSH administration's chronically failing attempt to invent a new legal system for holding and trying terrorism suspects has suffered yet another setback.

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New Zealand Herald
On Monday, the presiding military judge at the Guantanamo tribunals, Colonel Peter Brownback, delivered a bombshell when he dismissed all charges against one of two detainees.

Brownback ruled that tribunals could try only those deemed to be "unlawful enemy combatants".

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Salon
June 6, 2007 | GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- If the Bush administration had any sense, Monday's courtroom spectacle would mark the death knell of the military commissions in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

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Slate
What do John Ashcroft, Michael Luttig, Alberto Mora, David Petraeus, Robert Gates, Peter Brownback, and Keith Allred have in common? They are all lifelong conservatives and/or belt-and-suspenders, longtime military officers who were willing to both follow and, in their own ways, lead President Bush's "war on terror." Until, at least, each in his own way felt compelled to say, "Enough."

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Salon
June 5, 2007 | On Tuesday morning in a Washington, D.C., courtroom, Judge Reggie Walton will sentence I. Lewis Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, to anywhere from probation to 25 years in federal prison for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. Almost certainly Libby will receive no more than three years behind bars, since that's all the prosecution has requested, but if the students in my English Composition/Intro to Communications class had their way, Walton would probably spare him any prison time at all. My students are inmates at the Webster Correctional Institution in Cheshire, Conn., and they understand why Libby did what he did when investigators started asking him questions about Valerie Plame Wilson.

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Telegraph
The prosecution of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay has been thrown into chaos after military judges dismissed charges in the cases of a young Canadian detainee and the former driver of Osama bin Laden.

The judge, Colonel Peter Brownback, said that Toronto-born Omar Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan aged 15 in 2002, had only ever been defined as an "enemy combatant" at earlier hearings and not an "unlawful enemy combatant".

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Findlaw
Last week, the ACLU filed a suit that could provide human rights activists with an ingenious mechanism to allow a federal court to litigate whether torture sponsored by the U.S. is a tort - which would, in turn, mean its victims would be entitled to money damages.

This lawsuit is clever -- perhaps too clever, I will argue below, because it cannot be tried unless the entire government policy of extraordinary rendition is tried, and this is something I cannot imagine a federal court doing.

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New York Times
The facts of Omar Ahmed Khadr’s case are grim. The shrapnel from the grenade he is accused of throwing ripped through the skull of Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, who was 28 when he died.

To American military prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is a committed Al Qaeda operative, spy and killer who must be held accountable for killing Sergeant Speer in 2002 and for other bloody acts he committed in Afghanistan.

But there is one fact that may not fit easily into the government’s portrait of Mr. Khadr: He was 15 at the time.

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New York Times
In the last 100 Supreme Court arguments, Clarence Thomas has not uttered a word. Court watchers have suggested a variety of explanations. Among the least flattering: he is afraid that if he speaks he will reveal his ignorance about the case; he is so ideologically driven that he invariably comes with his mind made up; or he has contempt for the process.

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Salon
June 1, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- The Senate Intelligence Committee has signaled to the White House that an infamously abusive secret CIA program to interrogate high-level al-Qaida types may have to be scrapped, given "the damage the program does to the image of the United States abroad." It is a stinging rejection of a program that President Bush late last year called "one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American history" and comes as administration lawyers are reportedly crafting new, secret rules to govern it.

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FindLaw
On June 5, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton will sentence Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who has been convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and perjury, as the result of the Special Counsel investigation arising from the revelation of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent. I suspect that Judge Walton's actions will create a difficult and delicate problem for the White House.

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Mother Jones
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg led the dissent to the Court's 5-4 decision Tuesday on Ledbetter vs. the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The case, which decided that pay discrimination cases could not be brought against employers more than 180 days after any alleged discrimination, also marked the second time in six weeks that Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench: an unusually high rate of occurrence for the historically reticent justice who is described as friends as an etiquette-minded, "white-glove person." In fact, Ginsburg had never read her dissent to the Court's decision aloud twice in one year. Ginsburg went years without employing the tactic previous to this term.

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Washington Post
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has demanded a legal review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program for terrorism suspects as part of its version of the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill.

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Washington Post
IN ASKING Congress to legalize the CIA's secret prison program last year, President Bush claimed that the "alternative procedures" adopted for the interrogation of terrorism suspects "were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations." In fact, as is made clear in a newly declassified report by the Defense Department's deputy inspector general for intelligence, the administration did not so much design as reverse-engineer its methods. The guiding authority was not the Constitution but the practices of secret police in places such as the former Soviet Union.

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Los Angeles Times
RARELY DOES the Supreme Court do more damage to its stature than when it ignores facts in order to achieve legal results. That tendency was on display this week as the court's increasingly familiar conservative bloc attempted to bend life as most know it into one the court would prefer.

The case involved Lilly Ledbetter, a Goodyear tire plant supervisor who discovered that she had been paid less than her male colleagues for much of her long career. Once she discovered this discrepancy, she filed discrimination charges.

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Washington Post
The congressional testimony this month by former deputy attorney general James Comey called into question the accuracy of everything I had heard before about the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. According to Comey, in the spring of 2004 President Bush authorized a program of domestic surveillance even though his acting attorney general was so concerned about the surveillance that he could not in good faith "certify its legality."

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Chicago Tribune
For some people, the key to happiness is low standards. If you never expect much out of life, you will rarely be disappointed, and you will be content with outcomes that others would find unbearable. It's a formula that is working quite satisfactorily for President Bush and many congressional Republicans in the controversy over the U.S. attorney firings.

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Slate
Monica Goodling and the "girl" card: Nobody seems to want to go there, so we will.

Let's pretend for a moment that the world divides into two types of women: the soft, shy, girly kind who live to serve and the brash, aggressive feminists who live to emasculate. Not our paradigm, but one that's more alive than dead.

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Slate
Congress could and should impeach Alberto Gonzales. One ground for doing so, as I have previously suggested (subscription required), is the attorney general's amnesiac prevarication in his testimony before the Senate and the House. But if Congress wants more, it need look no further than the firing of David Iglesias, former U.S. attorney in New Mexico. The evidence uncovered in Gonzales' Senate and House testimony demonstrates that he fired Iglesias not because of a policy disagreement or a management failure, but because Iglesias would not misuse the power of the Department of Justice in the service of the Republican Party. To fire a U.S. attorney for refusing to abuse his power is the essence of an impeachable offense.

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Jurist
The central problem with the federal criminal prosecution of one-time alleged “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, now underway in Miami, is that the trial itself will not provide any resolution to the real question that the Padilla case has always raised: Whether the U.S. government can subject U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil to incommunicado military detention (and, allegedly, to mental and physical abuse while in military custody).

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Huffington Post
It was Afghanistan time, February 7th, 2002, when President Bush signed an order that reinforced Secretary Rumsfeld's instructions to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that they inform combat commanders that "Al Quaeda and Taliban individuals...are not entitled to prisoner of war status for purposes of the Geneva Convention of 1949."

Then came the war with Iraq.

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New York Times
Last year, Congressional Democrats allowed the Bush administration to ram through one of the worst laws in the nation’s history — the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This year, the Democrats pledged to use their new majority to begin repairing the profound damage the law has done to the nation’s justice system and global image.

But there are disturbing signs their pledge may fall victim to the same tactical political calculations and Bush administration propagandizing that allowed this scandalous law to pass in the first place.

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Newsweek
May 7, 2007 - President Bush did not mince words May 1, in announcing his decision to veto the Iraq supplemental appropriations bill. “This legislation is unconstitutional because it purports to direct the conduct of the operations of the war in a way that infringes upon the powers vested in the presidency by the Constitution, including as commander in chief of the armed forces,” Bush said. His pronouncement did more than blunt a Democratic-led congressional effort to start winding down the war. He also planted the seeds for an extraordinarily sweeping assertion of presidential power—one which, if carried to its logical conclusion, could allow him to defy any and all congressional restrictions on the conduct of war in the future.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, May 3 — The House of Representatives voted today to extend “hate crime” protection to people who are victimized because of their sexuality. But the most immediate effect of the bill may be to set up another veto showdown between Democrats and President Bush.

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New York Times
The five-year-old military prison at Guantánamo Bay, with its indefinite detention rules, lack of judicial review and insufficiently regulated interrogation techniques, is an ugly stain on this country’s long tradition of respect for the rule of law and an endless propaganda bonanza for America’s enemies. Yet it is clear that despite the good advice of friendly foreign leaders, members of Congress and even his own cabinet officials, President Bush has no intention of closing the facility unless Congress forces him to do so.

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Huffington Post
Senator Feingold's recent post "After the Veto" was a stirring call to affirm and sustain a constitutional opposition to a president out of control. Every day, George W. Bush arrogates to himself some new power to override the will of the people, or to revise in secret the laws of the land.

This is the first of our presidents who seems never to have read the Constitution of the United States.

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Los Angeles Times
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has a shameful record when it comes to detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base who assert that they are wrongly being held as "enemy combatants." At first, the administration argued that detainees had no right to consult a lawyer, period. Later, it had to disavow a mean-spirited attack by a Pentagon official on lawyers who had dared to represent "terrorists."

Now the administration is rightly being criticized for asking a federal court to scale back the detainees' access to their lawyers (only three visits once an attorney has been retained) and to place restrictions on attorney-client mail.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — At first glance, Scott J. Bloch seems to fit the profile of the "loyal Bushie," the kind of person the White House salted through the Washington bureaucracy to make sure federal agencies heeded administration priorities.

But Bloch, 48, is a man who defies expectations.

The lifelong Republican runs an agency — the Office of Special Counsel — that is turning its investigative spotlight on the White House, in particular the political operation headed by Karl Rove.

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Washington Post
President Bush wants to wish you a Happy Law Day.

He wants you, he says in his 2007 Law Day proclamation, to know that "Our Nation is built upon the rule of law."

He wants you to recognize how America's lawyers have "helped make our Nation a shining example of justice."

If only the president would practice what he proclaims.

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The Age (AU)
EVEN with a partial victory under the Pentagon's belt, Defence Secretary Robert Gates believes President George Bush's war crimes court in Guantanamo lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the world.

The US is poised to win its first conviction at its first war crimes tribunal since World War II with a formal, detailed guilty plea expected overnight from David Hicks.

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OpEd News
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is right to point Unitary Executive George W. Bush toward a copy of the Constitution. The President (should Bush care to resume that legal role) is permitted to veto bills but not to write them. In particular, the President cannot rewrite legislation after it has been voted on and before he signs it. Nor can any member of Congress.

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Truthdig
It is appropriate that a person from Australia, home of the kangaroo, should be the first one dragged before the kangaroo court at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. David Hicks, imprisoned there for more than five years, pleaded guilty Monday to providing material support for terrorism.

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New York Times
It is a challenge to keep track of all the ways the Bush administration is eroding constitutional protections, but one that should get more attention is its abuse of the state secrets doctrine. A federal appeals court in Virginia this month accepted the administration’s claim that the doctrine barred a lawsuit of a torture victim from going forward, and the government is using the defense in another torture case in New York. The Supreme Court needs to scale back the use of this dangerous legal defense.

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Washington Post
CULLY STIMSON may be gone from the Pentagon, but his spirit unfortunately lives on. Mr. Stimson, you may recall, was the Pentagon official in charge of Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had to leave his post after suggesting that private law firms shouldn't be representing detainees. Now the Pentagon's chief Guantanamo prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, has gotten into the attack-the-defense-lawyers act. . .

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Jurist
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in a unanimous decision has dismissed the action of Khaled el-Masri asserting claims related to his extraordinary rendition. The basis of the dismissal is the state secrets doctrine.

This decision presents us with the lawlessness of the internal law situation we have.

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Los Angeles Times
When the Bush administration shut down the nation's largest Muslim charity five years ago, officials of the Dallas-based foundation denied allegations it was linked to terrorists and insisted that a number of accusations were fabricated by the government.

Now, attorneys for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development say the government's own documents provide evidence of that claim.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
Following an appeals court’s divided decision upholding the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act, opponents of the measure are racing the clock to file an appeal to the US Supreme Court and have it heard during the court’s current term.

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Time
A federal appeals court in Washington has teed up yet another Guantanamo Bay decision for the U.S. Supreme Court, and if the justices review the case, they probably won't like what they see.

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Washington Post
In November, Americans voiced their frustration with the war in Iraq and gave control of Congress to the Democrats. The voters rejected the president's swaggering, go-it-alone approach and the administration's contemptuous attitude toward the Geneva Conventions, which led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, actions that so damaged our credibility that other nations are much less willing to cooperate in the war on terrorism. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and her able legal adviser, John Bellinger, have pushed for reforms that have begun to reverse this trend -- but much more must be done.

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In These Times
According to the U.S. government, Guantánamo Bay is leased to Uncle Sam by the Cuban government. However, Cuba does not recognize U.S. claims to the Bay and has not accepted lease payments for decades. Therefore, while Guantánamo is officially Cuban territory, it is effectively a fiefdom of the United States military. Guantánamo’s bizarre political status makes it a perfect haven for the parallel legal universe the Bush administration has created for “enemy combatants.”

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Although the Bush administration has said that six U.S. attorneys were fired recently in part because of "performance related" issues, at least five of them received positive job evaluations before they were ordered to step down.

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CounterPunch
Despite the best efforts of federal prosecutors, a Chicago jury refused to convict Palestinian activist Muhammad Salah on racketeering charges in one of the highest-profile cases of the Bush administration's "war on terror."

Salah and co-defendant Abdelhaleem Ashqar were acquitted on charges that they engaged in a "racketeering conspiracy" to provide money and other aid to the Palestinian organization Hamas in the early 1990s. The two were convicted of several lesser charges unrelated to terrorism.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 — One figure has dominated the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. without even showing up in the courtroom. Day after day, the jury has heard accounts of the actions of Vice President Dick Cheney, watched as his handwritten notes were displayed on a giant screen, heard how he directed leaks to the news media and ordered the White House to publicly defend Mr. Libby, his top aide and close confidante.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 — If he testifies as expected, Dick Cheney would be the first sitting vice president, at least in modern times, to appear as a witness in a criminal trial. And if he testifies in court, he may also be the first to give live testimony in defense of a subordinate’s actions on his behalf, legal historians said.

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Boston Globe
More than 200 years of US history have borne out the good sense of the Founding Fathers who divvied up power between Congress and the president. Congress passes a bill; the president either signs it or vetoes it. If Congress still feels strongly about a rejected bill, it can override the veto with two-thirds majorities in both houses. President Bush has upset that balance by using signing statements, which are not subject to an override, to ignore laws he disapproves of but signs. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers , has begun an overdue investigation of any cases in which Bush has relied on signing statements to violate laws.

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Baltimore Sun
The news that the Bush administration has replaced seven U.S. attorneys, none charged with or guilty of wrongdoing, with people fairly describable as Washington apparatchiks should give pause to all those concerned with America's working Constitution.

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Washington Post
What do President Bush's "signing statements" really signify? When the president asserts his right to ignore legislation passed by Congress --- such as the ban on torture --- is he then acting on that assertion? Or is it just harmless ideological bluster?

When the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage first wrote about Bush's use of these stealthy statements more than a year ago, neither the Washington press corps nor the Republican-controlled Congress expressed any enthusiasm about getting to the bottom of this important Constitutional riddle.

But elections do have consequences.

And as Savage writes in today's Boston Globe: "The new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said yesterday that he is launching an aggressive investigation into whether the Bush administration has violated any of the laws it claimed a right to ignore in presidential 'signing statements.'

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New York Times
Washington

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

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Huffington Post
All Americans regardless of political philosophy or party affiliation ought to take note when the attorney general tells the Senate Judiciary Committee that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus.

In justifying the law signed by the president last October that stripped federal courts of their authority to hear habeas corpus suits by noncitizens labeled "enemy combatants," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified last week: "The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas."

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One Thousand Reasons
I have no desire to get embroiled in the current tangled debate on immigration, either legal or illegal. However, I have watched with interest the intense campaign for President Bush first to intervene in the trial of two border patrol agents accused of shooting a suspected Mexican drug dealer as he fled, and then to pardon the agents for the crime after they were convicted.

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Arab News
WASHINGTON, 20 January 2007 — The Pentagon unveiled new guidelines for trials of “war on terror” detainees that will allow hearsay and coerced information to be introduced as evidence if a judge considers it credible.

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Seattle PI
The government's pursuit of every possible advantage in the prosecution of detainees risks catastrophic consequences for individuals, our concepts of justice and our international standing.

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Think Progress
As many as eight U.S. Attorneys are leaving or being pushed out of their positions by the Bush administration. Several of these prosecutors are working on high-profile cases, such as Carol Lam, who ran the investigation into the corruption of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA).

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Huffington Post
Dick Cheney has been waging a quiet war against the United States of America for quite some time now. For several decades, although he moved in and out of positions of power, he could never really make a dent in the constitutional checks and balances inherent in our government. But over the last six years, he has won many battles and set back the Americans system of government significantly.

But today, America struck back.

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Consortium News
In one of the most chilling public statements ever made by a U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales questioned whether the U.S. Constitution grants habeas corpus rights of a fair trial to every American.

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New York Times
There’s something happening here, and what it is seems completely clear: the Bush administration is trying to protect itself by purging independent-minded prosecutors.

(Paid Subscription Required)

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New York Times
In a four-paragraph letter on Wednesday announcing that the Bush administration had reversed its position and would submit its domestic surveillance program to judicial supervision, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales used one phrase three times. A secret court, he said, had fashioned a way to allow the program to be monitored by the judiciary without compromising the need for “speed and agility.”

That phrase also captures, some critics say, the administration’s moving-target litigation strategy, one that often seeks to change the terms of the debate just as a claim of executive authority is about to be tested in the courts or in Congress.

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Boston Globe
SAN FRANCISCO --Two U.S. Attorneys in California announced they are stepping down, as critics alleged political pressure from the Bush administration was pushing them and others out of their jobs.

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Boston Globe
WHEN THE shameful history of the Guantanamo detention center is finally written, one of the few reassuring chapters will be the way lawyers from many US law firms have given pro-bono representation to prisoners who have been denied their Geneva Convention rights. It is especially outrageous that the Pentagon official responsible for detainees has maligned these lawyers and encouraged corporations to take their legal business away from their firms.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 — Paradox seems to define I. Lewis Libby Jr., who remains a bit mysterious even to close colleagues. He is the White House policy enforcer who also wrote a literary novel; a buttoned-down Washington lawyer who likes knocking back tequila shots in cowboy bars and hurtling down mountains on skis and bikes; and a 56-year-old intellectual known to all by his childhood nickname, Scooter.

But now comes the most baffling paradox of all, as Mr. Libby, former chief of staff and alter ego to Vice President Dick Cheney, began his trial in federal court here on Tuesday on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. By all accounts a first-rate legal mind and a hypercautious aide whose discretion frustrated reporters, he is charged with repeatedly lying to a grand jury and to the F.B.I. about his leaks to the news media in the battle over Iraq war intelligence.

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Los Angeles Times
THE PENTAGON has disavowed some offensive criticism by one of its officials regarding American lawyers who have represented accused terrorists imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But the crankish comments of Charles "Cully" Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for detainee affairs, reflect a more pervasive reluctance by the Bush administration to acknowledge that injustices have occurred at Guantanamo.

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New York Times
The Bush administration has appointed an extreme political partisan as the new United States attorney for Arkansas. Normally, the Senate would have vetted him, and quite possibly blocked his appointment. But the White House took advantage of a little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act, which allows it to do an end run around the Senate.

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Washington Post
Private contractors and other civilians serving with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan could be subject for the first time to military courts-martial under a new federal provision that legal scholars say is almost certain to spark constitutional challenges.

The provision, which was slipped into a spending bill at the end of the last Congress, is intended to close a long-standing loophole that critics say puts contractors in war zones above the law.

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New York Times
Birmingham, Ala.

Jack Cline is in a hospital here fighting for his life, stricken by leukemia that he says he got from exposure to benzene at his factory job. In most states, he would be able to sue the companies that made the benzene. But Alabama’s all-Republican, wildly pro-business Supreme Court threw out his case.

In a ruling that would have done Kafka proud, the court held that there was never a valid time for Mr. Cline to sue.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

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New York Times
No one who has followed President Bush’s policies on detainees should be surprised when a member of his team scorns American notions of justice. But even by that low standard, the administration’s new attack on lawyers who dare to give those prisoners the meager representation permitted them is contemptible.

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AlterNet
While the November elections provided the Democratic Party a public mandate to end the war in Iraq, President Bush has signaled his intent to utilize his institutional powers as Commander in Chief to maintain and even escalate the U.S. commitment, public or congressional opinion notwithstanding. The Democratic leadership has removed two obvious ways to stop him -- impeachment and a cutoff of war funds -- from the table. Some Democrats have even indicated they will acquiesce in the sending of tens of thousands more troops to Iraq.

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Los Angeles Times
MOST AMERICANS recognize Brown vs. Board of Education as the 1954 decision that outlawed state-sanctioned segregation in public education. The decision inspired race-conscious government efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to integrate public schools and to bring racial minorities into the mainstream of American life.

But now, as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of race-conscious school integration plans in Louisville and Seattle, some say Brown stands for a different proposition.

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The Nation
The Bush administration's Department of Defense is examining whether it has the power to break a strike at tire plants that supply the military.

The Constitution affords the executive branch no such authority. But, as should be obvious by now, the current administration has little regard for the founding document.

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Washington Post
On Wednesday, a federal judge dismissed the habeas corpus petition of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Latin for "you have the body," habeas corpus allows detainees to ask a court to order their warden to explain the basis for their detention. Hamdan's petition was dismissed because of the Military Commissions Act, which Congress passed last fall to take away the habeas rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The MCA is a classic example of "jurisdiction stripping." When the courts hand down rulings that Congress doesn't like, lawmakers sometimes retaliate by trying to take away their power to hear certain kinds of cases, or by strictly limiting what they can do.

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Washington Post
The Pentagon is invoking emergency authority to expedite funding of a war-crimes-court compound at its Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England has informed Congress.

Defense spokesmen would not say when, if ever, the Pentagon had last invoked similar authority. Nor would they specify which military construction already approved by Congress would be frozen to fund the court project, which could cost as much as $125 million, according to U.S. government documents.

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Huffington Post
George Bush has done some iffy things since seizing power, but the one that really hit me where I live was ruining Billy Wilder's Stalag 17.

If you're not into old movies, you should know that Stalag 17 is a cynical, fast-talking dark comedy set in a prisoner of war camp, kind of a cross between Grand Illusion and His Girl Friday.

Of course, if you're not into old movies, knowing it's a cross between Grand Illusion and His Girl Friday probably didn't help much. Let me start again...

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MSNBC
LOS ANGELES - A federal judge struck down President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutional and vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.

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Washington Post
A Los Angeles federal judge has ruled that key portions of a presidential order blocking financial assistance to terrorist groups are unconstitutional, further complicating the Bush administration's attempts to defend its aggressive anti-terrorism tactics in federal courts.

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Consortium News
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who runs the giant agency that keeps track of threats to the United States, has shared what he calls his “chilling vision” of the future – a time when U.S. government actions might be constrained by international law.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --Former Attorney General Janet Reno and seven other former Justice Department officials filed court papers Monday arguing that the Bush administration is setting a dangerous precedent by trying a suspected terrorist outside the court system.

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Jurist
JURIST Guest Columnist Benjamin Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law says that despite recent disparaging comments by US Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff, international law is also American law, and we must respect our obligations as citizens of the international community, not arbitrarily dismiss or avoid them so as to facilitate torture of detainees or other wrongful acts...

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Huffington Post
Of the many good things we are beginning to see before the newly-constituted Democratic Congress even assumes power, one of the most gratifying is the move by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) to neuter the hideous Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), passed by the Republicans, and signed by George W. Bush in October.

On Friday, Dodd introduced legislation to amend Bush's "torture bill," remove the almost-dictatorial powers it has given the White House and neutralize the bastardizing effect it's had on the United States Constitution.

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The Hill
Gearing up for a major clash with the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress, several key Senate Democrats are planning to overhaul the newly minted legislation governing military tribunals of detainees.

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Los Angeles Times
THE BUSH administration has fared miserably with the U.S. Supreme Court when it comes to its more controversial post-Sept. 11 initiatives. That losing streak could be extended now that lawyers for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have taken aim at the new Military Commissions Act, which purports to prevent their clients from filing habeas corpus petitions.

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Seattle PI
Those who haven't been persuaded to vote for Democratic candidates in Tuesday's midterm elections have recently been given yet another good reason to consider doing so.

On Oct. 17, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the administration's latest and arguably most dangerous attack on both the U.S. Constitution and the international rule of law.

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The Nation
Over the past quarter century, an increasingly influential legal movement on the far right has been working stealthily to impose a narrow social agenda on the broader body politic. The basic idea is to get judges appointed to the federal bench who will shred popular laws protecting workers, consumers and public health while expanding executive power--at the expense of basic civil liberties.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 — Frustrated with a recent round of laws and regulations that have been used to sue big companies and auditing firms, corporate America — with the encouragement of the Bush administration — is preparing to fight back.

Now that corruption cases like Enron and WorldCom are falling out of the news, two influential industry groups with close ties to administration officials are hoping to swing the regulatory pendulum in the opposite direction.

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People's Daily
The new anti-terrorism law approved by the United States earlier this month contains provisions that violate international treaties and contradict the principles of fair trial, a key UN human rights expert said Friday.

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The Nation
Yet another reason why Americans who believe in accountability and oversight should be pulling for Democrats to win this November…

While the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction doesn't have the teeth of an independent war profiteering commission, the office has provided some measure of oversight. But the Defense Authorization Act signed by George Bush last week "states that the inspector general's office will halt its examination of those expenditures by October of next year," James Glanz reported in The New York Times yesterday.

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Chicago Tribune
We are engaged in a struggle between freedom and the forces of terror, my little macacas, and mostly I side with freedom, such as the freedom to look at big shots and stick out your tongue and blow, but of course terror has its place too. The dude strolling down our street at night does not break into our house to see what's available because he is terrified that if he's nabbed, his girlfriend Janine will run off to Philly with her ex-boyfriend Eddie who's been hanging around. She's the best thing in Benny's life right now. So he walks on by and leaves our stereo be.

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CounterPunch
On October 17th, George W. Bush, signed into law a bill he bulldozed through Congress that, in Senator Patrick Leahy's prophetic words, would suspend "the writ of habeas corpus, a core value in American law, in order to avoid judicial review that prevents government abuse." This law, whose constitutionality is in doubt and will be reviewed by the Supreme Court in due time, puts so much arbitrary and secret unilateral power in the hands of the Presidency that the ghost of King George III must be wondering what all the fuss was about in 1776.

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Seattle PI
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has signed the law that legalizes the administration's shameful treatment of detainees suspected of terrorism.

The same measure also empowers the president to define torture. It's a sad legacy for the U.S. and its already-tarnished world image.

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BBC
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has expressed concern over a newly-approved US anti-terrorism law.

ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger said the law raised "questions" about its compliance with the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war.

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CounterPunch
In February 2005, attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted of providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy. The charges arose from her representation of Sheik Abdel-Rahman, convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

The government wanted her to serve 30 years in prison. But this Monday, October 16, Stewart was sentenced to 28 months. The translator who was her codefendant, Mohamed Yousry, was sentenced to 20 months. Stewart is free on bail, pending her appeal.

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New York Times
Las Vegas

LAST week President Bush signed a law that will try to impede online gambling by prohibiting American banks from transferring money to gambling sites. Most Americans probably didn’t notice or care, but it may do significant political damage to the Republicans this fall and long-term damage to Americans’ respect for the law.

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Washington Post
President Bush has signed into law Congress's latest attempt to clarify our country's position on proper treatment of detainees and the boundaries of legitimate interrogation techniques. Unfortunately, this legislation demonstrates that both the administration and Congress have failed to learn important lessons from what Bush described as the "biggest mistake that's happened so far" in Iraq: the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib.

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Seattle PI
The weather was dreary in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, but an even darker cloud hung over the nation's tradition of civil liberties.

President Bush signed a bill that symbolized Congress' continued craven surrender of power to the executive branch.

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Washington Post
We know now what we didn't know then, back in the dark days of the autumn of 2001, and we still cannot get it right. After five years we now have a long track record of seeing what can, will and usually does go wrong when the administration acts unilaterally in the legal war on terror. It has been written into the record of one Supreme Court case after another, one lower court ruling following the next, and still we accept the premise that the rule of law as we knew it could and should be twisted unrecognizably, now and forever more, until this ill-defined, ever-evolving, undeclared war is over.

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Informed Comment
Bush and a supine, cowardly Congress shredded the US Constitution on Tuesday, abolishing the right of a court review (habeas corpus) for some classes of suspect. Suspect, mind you, not proven criminal.

In other words, we have to be confident that George W. Bush is so competent, all-knowing, and inherently just that we can just trust him.

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Washington Post
On rare occasions, President Bush and his toughest critics agree on something. That will happen today when Bush signs the Military Commissions Act, while claiming "clear" authorization from Congress for "enhanced" CIA interrogations. Many critics claim the bill authorizes torture. Fortunately, both sides are wrong.

You can't blame the CIA for demanding clear authorization. It reportedly was using waterboarding (a terrifying mock execution in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and convinced he is being drowned), dousing naked prisoners with water in 50-degree cold and forcing shackled prisoners to stand for 40 straight hours.

Should the CIA be worried? Yes. The United States has prosecuted every one of these techniques as a war crime.

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Lew Rockwell
The case for impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney is far stronger than the case against President Bill Clinton or the pending case that drove President Nixon to resign. With Republican control of Congress, especially of the House where impeachment must originate, it is hardly surprising that impeachment of the Republican Bush administration is a dead letter.

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MSNBC
The president has now succeeded where no one has before. He’s managed to kill the writ of habeas corpus. Tonight, a special investigation, how that, in turn, kills nothing less than your Bill of Rights. Because the Mark Foley story began to break on the night of September 28, exploding the following day, many people may not have noticed the bill passed by the Senate that night.

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Boston Globe
NASHUA, N.H. --Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, who has been participating in discussions marking the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, said the recently passed terrorism bill wrongly gives President Bush the authority to detain people without charging them with a crime.

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Washington Post
President Bush reserved the right to ignore key changes in Congress's overhaul of the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- including a requirement to appoint someone with experience handling disasters as the agency's head -- in setting aside dozens of provisions contained in a major homeland security spending bill this week.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON -- President Bush this week asserted that he has the executive authority to disobey a new law in which Congress has set minimum qualifications for future heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

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CounterPunch
So, waterboarding is now OK. So is the suspension of one of our basic rights of freedom-the Writ of Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus, according to the U.S. Constitution, can only be suspended in cases of invasion or rebellion. Our Supreme Court has held, "habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action."

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Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – President Bush has yet to sign into law Congress's new terror-detainee legislation, but defense lawyers are already asking federal judges to strike down key parts of the measure as unconstitutional.

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New York Times
Kintbury, England

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

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Guardian
The Bush administration yesterday faced a raft of legal challenges to a sweeping new regime for Guantánamo that would deny court oversight to detainees in the war on terror, and would bar prosecution of US personnel for war crimes.

Mr Bush is expected to move within days to sign into law proposals for the treatment and trial before military tribunals of the detainees. The legislation, approved by the senate on Thursday, is a victory for the White House over senate Republicans, who had resisted attempts to relax standards on the treatment of detainees, and depart from standard rules of evidence in their trials.

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Huffington Post
Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two-thirds of THE SENATE AND AND WELL OVER HALF THE House concurring, that the following articles proposed by ME THE PRESIDENT OF the United States; all of which articles, when ratified by the said Legislatures I SHALL BE FREE TO DO WHAT THE HELL I WANT TO ANY TERRORIST SCUM.

THESE ARTICLES to be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the said Constitution.
Amendment I

Congress shall HAVE no respect FOR any religion WHICH INVOLVES KNEELING ON A RUG AND WEARING A DISHCLOTH ON YOUR STUPID HEAD AND CAN prohibit the exercise thereof or HAVE YOU WATERBOARDED OR MADE TO HANG BY YOUR THUMBS FROM A CHIN-UP BAR AND DO CHIN-UPS OR BURY YOU ALIVE FOR A WHILE IN A SHALLOW GRAVE. THIS IS THE KIND OF freedom WE'RE FIGHTING FOR WHICH I MENTIONED IN MY speech TO the press. OK?

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Boston Globe
GENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N. torture investigator charged on Friday that a new U.S. law for tough interrogation of terrorism suspects would deprive people of the right to a fair trial before independent courts and could lead to mistreatment.

Manfred Nowak, United Nations special rapporteur on torture, regretted that the bill ignored U.N. rights bodies which have said U.S. interrogation methods and prolonged detentions violate international law.

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New York Times
Congress, which has done so little this session to address the nation’s real problems, is expected to vote today on a deeply misguided giveaway for big real estate developers. The bill would create new property rights that could in many cases make it difficult, if not impossible, for local governments to stop property owners from using their land in socially destructive ways. It should be defeated.

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Washington Post
The military trials bill approved by Congress lends legislative support for the first time to broad rules for the detention, interrogation, prosecution and trials of terrorism suspects far different from those in the familiar American criminal justice system.

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Washington Post
Today's Senate vote on President Bush's detainee legislation, after House approval yesterday, marks a defining moment for this nation.

How far from our historic and Constitutional values are we willing to stray? How mercilessly are we willing to treat those we suspect to be our enemies? How much raw, unchecked power are we willing to hand over to the executive?

The legislation before the Senate today would ban torture, but let Bush define it; would allow the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant; would suspend the Great Writ of habeas corpus; would immunize retroactively those who may have engaged in torture. And that's just for starters.

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Slate
Is it still called a compromise when the president gets everything he wanted?

A major detainee bill hurtling down the HOV lane in Congress today would determine the extent to which the president can define and authorize torture. The urgency to pass this legislation has nothing to do with a new need to interrogate alleged enemy combatants. The urgency is about an election.

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Truthdig
With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.
______
AUSTIN, Texas—Oh dear. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. In Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, of planning to “cut and run” on Iraq.

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Washington Post
AFTER BARELY three weeks of debate, the Senate today will take up a momentous piece of legislation that would set new legal rules for the detention, interrogation and trial of accused terrorists. We have argued that the only remedy to the mess made by the Bush administration in holding hundreds of detainees without charge at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere since 2001 was congressional action. Yet rather than carefully weigh the issues, Congress has allowed itself to be stampeded into a vote on hastily written but far-reaching legal provisions, in a preelection climate in which dissenters risk being labeled as soft on terrorism.

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Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House-backed legislation on the treatment of terrorism suspects may protect them from torture but gives the United States immunity from legal challenges, human rights groups say.

The U.S. Senate bill laying out procedures for interrogating and trying suspected terrorists that is making its way through Congress this week would effectively protect President George W. Bush and future presidents from judicial oversight, rights advocates said.

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Washington Post
SEN. JOHN McCAIN (R-Ariz.) declared over the weekend that the compromise on detentions that he and other Republican senators worked out with the White House would bar the most abusive of the CIA's interrogation tactics. Extreme sleep deprivation, induced hypothermia and simulated drownings, he said on CBS's "Face the Nation," would no longer be legal: "I'm confident that some of the abuses that were reportedly committed in the past will be prohibited in the future," he said. We wish we could be as sure.

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Washington Post
Republican lawmakers and the White House agreed over the weekend to alter new legislation on military commissions to allow the United States to detain and try a wider range of foreign nationals than an earlier version of the bill permitted, according to government sources.

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New York Times
Until five months ago, Bilal Hussein was part of a team of Associated Press photographers that had won a Pulitzer Prize for photos documenting the fighting and carnage in Iraq.

Now he’s a prisoner, having been seized by the U.S. government.

You might ask: What’s he been charged with?

The answer: Nothing.

(Paid Subscription Required)

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New York Times
I’M pleased that President Bush has said he will enforce the letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions. I hope he stays true to his word.

My great respect for the conventions developed not from afar, but from the ground, in the Second World War, at the dirty-boot level, where the bullet meets the soldier.

As a young Army lieutenant, I had the job of making clear to the enemy, via loud speaker or leaflet-filled artillery shells, that the accords would be honored. Over and over, from Normandy to the Elbe, in tanks and in foxholes, my sergeants and I would say in German, “You will be well handled according to the Geneva Conventions.”

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AlterNet
The United States is following the lead of "dirty war" nations, such as Argentina and Chile, in enacting what amounts to an amnesty law protecting U.S. government operatives, apparently up to and including President George W. Bush, who have committed or are responsible for human rights crimes.

While the focus of the current congressional debate has been on Bush's demands to redefine torture and to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, the compromise legislation also would block prosecutions for violations already committed during the five-year-old "war on terror."

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New York Times
In recent decades, women’s advocates and human rights activists have made huge progress on the issues of rape and sexual assault — in the United States and globally. Both crimes are now more powerfully defined in state and federal laws. In international law, where rape and sexual assault have long been classified as torture and war crimes, the world has begun to accept the importance of enforcement. In 1998, a tribunal convicted a paramilitary chief for watching one of his men rape a woman in Serbia. A year ago, the world rose up in outrage when United Nations peacekeepers raped women in Congo.

You’d think this was a settled issue. But it’s been opened up again in the bill on jailing, interrogating and trying terror suspects that President Bush is trying to ram through Congress in a pre-election rush.

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New York Times
The compromise reached on Thursday between Congressional Republicans and the White House on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects is, legal experts said yesterday, a series of interlocking paradoxes.

It would impose new legal standards that it forbids the courts to enforce.

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Jurist
Congressional adoption of the recent “compromise” between three Republican Senators (McCain, Warner, and Graham) and President Bush does not provide proper legal guidance to U.S. interrogators and adherence merely to its standards would place the United States in violation of common Article 3 and other provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (such as Articles 1, 146-147 of the Geneva Civilian Convention), not to mention similar provisions in several other international treaties and instruments and customary international law. Those who would authorize, abet, or implement the “compromise” language in violation of common Article 3 (for example, CIA or U.S. military personnel) would be subject to criminal and civil sanctions outside the United States in any foreign forum and in certain international courts. No Act of Congress would change this result. As those involved in the “dirty war” interrogation tactics in Argentina and Chile have learned, even comforting legislative limits and domestic immunity can change.

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Jurist
Confronted with a revolt by his own party, the President sunk to new levels of fear-mongering last week. He warned that America’s safety would be imperiled if defiant Republican senators did not approve the administration’s continued use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists at secret CIA prisons. The message was clear: America needs to torture others to defend itself.

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Rolling Stone
I think the Bush administration really must be scared. Their numbers on the midterms must be bleak. Else why would they be pushing so desperately to pass laws that whitewash their record of 4th-Amendment and human-rights abuses?

What’s most remarkable about both the Wiretap and the Detainee Torture bills that are now the focus of the last days of the 109th Congress is that they both provide retroactive immunity from prosecution for wrongdoing.

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Slate
Disdain for the rule of law is infectious. It began in Guantanamo, but it is now invading the American heartland. The Bush administration sees the wiretapping scandal at the National Security Agency as an opportunity to take the constitutional offensive. It has rejected a careful bipartisan effort to adapt existing laws to new technological realities, seeking instead to liberate presidential power from all traditional restraints by Congress and the courts.

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Boston Globe
"TRUST US. You're guilty. We're going to execute you, but we can't tell you why." That is how Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, characterized the Bush administration's recent proposal for a draconian new trial system to deal with accused terrorists.

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Boston Globe
IN THE FIGHT over rules for the interrogation and trials of terrorism suspects, there is a split -- not so much between Republicans and Democrats or the White House and the Senate, but between leaders like President Bush with no combat experience and those like Colin Powell who know combat and want to maintain the Geneva Conventions as a protection for US troops.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
The Political Junkies

George Bush is the worst President the United States has ever had. Notice that I did not use the word “arguably.” He simply is. For one reason. He is the first President ever to have as his primary goal the destruction of the Constitutional, Democratic, system under which he took power (notice that I did not say “elected”). This is for him the absolutely primary goal. For the nation as a whole it would obviously be an unmitigated disaster. It stands above even those of: further entrenching the power of the extractive industries and further securing their dominance over U.S. economic and environmental policy; reducing the functions of the government other than those of repression at home and military expansion abroad, to the barest minimums; and filling the pockets of his rich supporters at the expense of the public treasury.

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CounterPunch
The Bush administration's full-court press against the Constitution is on, with the president getting closer to Senate, and possibly full Congressional approval of his warrantless spying program by the National Security Agency, and with a lobbying campaign on to get his program for kangaroo courts and life-time detention without trial for terror "war" detainees approved by Congress.

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New York Times
The Internal Revenue Service this week revoked the tax exemption of an anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue West, after receiving a complaint that it had violated prohibitions on electioneering by nonprofits in 2004.

The group had promised tax deductions for contributions to help defeat the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --Nine retired federal judges accused the Bush administration and Congress of trying to deprive detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of the most basic legal right.

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Washington Post
The Bush administration is marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks this week with a charm offensive touting its War on Terror. At the less charming end of the spectrum: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's nasty attacks on war critics. More charming: President Bush's new willingness to empty secret CIA prisons and put the alleged 9/11 ringleaders on trial. But what's missing from all these election-season defenses of the government's actions is the same ingredient that has always been missing: a fair-minded balancing of what's been lost against what's been gained.

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New York Times
SOME debates are so polarized, with the competing sides so certain that any compromise would be dangerous, that it’s hard to imagine any middle ground emerging.

The argument over how to try the 14 terror suspects recently transferred from Central Intelligence Agency prisons to military custody at Guantánamo Bay seems to be one of them.

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Arab News
President George Bush’s acknowledgment of the CIA’s secret detention centers to interrogate international terror suspects has surprised no one. They were known to exist. Indeed, the Council of Europe has tried to investigate these Abu Ghraibs in Europe and the ways in which the CIA moved the prisoners to and from them. Much more interesting is the timing of the admission. There is no obvious political pressure for him to tell the truth. Although starting a nationwide campaign in support of Republicans in November’s mid-term elections, this was not an issue that had put these candidates on a back foot.

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Washington Post
IN SENDING legislation to Congress to authorize military trials at Guantanamo Bay, President Bush appears to be hoping that, with an election just around the corner, Congress will not have the stomach to deny him the latitude he demands both on the trials themselves and on larger questions of the treatment of detainees. But quietly, over the past few weeks, a trio of Republican senators -- Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (Va.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and John McCain (Ariz.) -- has put together a remarkably good alternative bill on the subject.

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Jurist
As President Bush has now made his long awaited admission that there have been secret CIA prisons around the world in which individuals have been held in prolonged, secret incommunicado detention in clear violation of international law (see the ASIL Centennial Resolution), one has a sense of relief that the coverup is lifting and at least part of the truth is finally starting to come out.

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Boston Globe
IT IS NOT the US Supreme Court or Democrats in Congress that, five years after Sept. 11, have prevented any of the 14 ranking Al Qaeda suspects in US custody from being brought to justice. They have been kept in a legal limbo because the Bush administration did not want even to admit they were holding the 14 in secret prisons in foreign countries, and because the administration could not design procedures for their trials that would pass muster with the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. President Bush has raised the hopes of Sept. 11 survivors that justice is near, but those hopes will probably be dashed if Bush persists in pushing Congress to approve such flawed procedures.

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Washington Post
PRESIDENT BUSH took major steps yesterday toward cleaning up the mess his administration has made of the detention, interrogation and prosecution of those captured in the war on terrorism. In a White House speech, the president announced that all 14 high-value detainees being held in secret CIA facilities abroad had been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay for trial and registered with the International Red Cross. The Pentagon simultaneously released a new directive on detentions and a manual on interrogations that conforms with the Geneva Conventions and that explicitly bans techniques once authorized by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, such as hooding and the use of dogs. More broadly, Mr. Bush asked Congress to approve a legal framework for the trial of terrorist suspects, which would make the nation's response to the threat posed by al-Qaeda the product of democracy rather than secret executive decisions.

Yet as Mr. Bush took these constructive steps, he also undermined them.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - President Bush's stunning transfer of 14 top terror suspects to Guantanamo Bay boosted hopes that, at last, the architects of the Sept. 11 attacks will be brought to justice.

But some legal experts questioned whether their trials will ever occur - and whether Bush's maneuver is merely a power play to win congressional support for special military courts similar to those already struck down by the Supreme Court.

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Slate
he very best part of President Bush's speech today, about all the new systems in place for trying terrorists, was that virtually nothing he outlined was new. Instead, the president's offerings are a mix of old programs to which he's never admitted (including the CIA's secret detention and interrogation program); old programs that suddenly have new urgency (including his military commissions); and nods to the pre-existing legal systems that his lawyers rejected when they devised all these new programs in the first place (including the Geneva Conventions and laws prohibiting torture).

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The Nation
The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority--perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all "anti-terrorism" package. Why are they doing it, and how can they be stopped?

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Thomas Paine's Corner
His name is Junaid Ahmad. He is 24 years old. And he is among a rapidly increasing number of first generation Muslim-Americans who have decided to pursue careers in the law.

Ahmad, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, after his parents emigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1973, is a second-year student at William and Mary law school in Williamsburg, Virginia. He told us he chose the law over more traditional first-generation Americans’ choices – medicine, science and engineering – because he cares deeply about human rights and civil liberties.

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AJC
If I knew a terrorist, I would ask how much Osama bin Laden Inc. counts on the massive, unnecessary expense and damage America inflicts on itself by overreacting to the threat of terror.

The foolishness of color-coded alerts and X-raying the shoes of all airplane passengers is well-known. The huge expense and bureaucracy of the Transportation Security Administration is a monument to our miscalculation of risk. And so on. But, as a lawyer, I'm more interested in the thinking of government officials who should know better.

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Village Voice
On December 16, 2005, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtbau broke a front-page story, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," that won them a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting—and an investigation by the Justice Department for possible unlawful releasing of classified information that may ultimately include charges of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. (The president had urged the Times not to publish the story, and condemned its appearance.)

Now, in a 43-page decision in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Anna Diggs Taylor, an alumna of the civil rights movement and the first black judge to sit on that Michigan federal court, has greatly intensified the fierce national debate—in and out of Congress—caused by the Times' adherence to James Madison's message to insure the future of the Constitution: "The censorial power is in the people over the Government—and not in the Government over the people."

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Seattle PI
WASHINGTON -- "There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created in the Constitution."

That eloquent putdown of an imperial presidency was the essence of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who declared President Bush's warrantless wiretap program was unconstitutional.

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Truthdig
AUSTIN, Texas—Another bee-you-ti-ful example of the right-wing media getting it all wrong. Here they are having the nerve to mutter in public about “activist judges” because Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has pointed out that spying without a warrant is illegal in this country—so warrantless telephone tapping is illegal in this country.

Improbably enough, the first complaint of many of these soi-disant legal scholars is that Taylor’s decision is not well written. No judicial masterpiece, they sneer. Nevertheless, warrantless spying is illegal. Did it ever occur to these literary critics that Taylor has a lay-down hand? The National Security Agency program is flat unconstitutional, and for those who insist this means Osama bin Laden wins, it’s also ridiculously easy to fix so that it is constitutional.

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Lew Rockwell
Prediction: Before leaving office, President Bush will issue a shockingly large number of presidential pardons to operatives who, with the administration’s blessing, ventured far outside the law to wage Bush’s “war on terror.” Bush may even owe some of his underlings use of the pardon pen, since they relied in good faith on radical legal opinions crafted by White House lawyers to justify an “anything goes” response to enemies real and imagined.

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