From sjlendman.blogspot
By Stephen Lendman

On July 2, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (Washington) ruled on US v. Libby (07-3068) saying I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby must be imprisoned while appealing his conviction March 6 of lying to federal investigators and a grand jury and obstructing their probe of the 2003 leaking of CIA official Valerie Plame’s identity. The court said Libby “has not shown that the appeal raises a substantial question” for him to remain free under federal law. Earlier, US District Judge Reggie Walton refused to let Libby remain free during appeal saying evidence of his guilt was “overwhelming.” Libby faced 30 months in prison and a $250,000 fine for his conviction handed down June 5 and as of early July 2 appeared heading for incarceration within weeks.

Enter George Bush in his latest brazen and contemptuous defiance of the law. Within hours of
yesterday’s court decision, he ignored overwhelming public opposition to a pardon and commuted the sentence of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. Case closed with little more than the president’s cynical statement that he “respect(s) the jury’s verdict….But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.” Libby needn’t worry about the fine either. His rich friends will take care of that, too, as part of the deal. Read the rest of this entry »

From Salon
By Joan Walsh

I got email from people I respect suggesting I was a little soft on Bush’s Libby cave-in, mainly because I expected it. I just can’t get that angry when thinks work out like I expect. I just assume guys like Libby are going to be saved by their wealthy, powerful friends. And so did Scooter.

Still, this from Bloomberg, via Think Progress, rankled: “Bush has granted fewer pardons — 113 — than any president in the past 100 years, while denying more than 1,000 requests, said Margaret Colgate Love, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. In addition, Bush has denied more than 4,000 commutation requests, and hundreds of requests for pardons and commutations are still pending, Love said.”

And this from America’s Prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani, ought to rankle everyone. “After evaluating the facts, the president came to a reasonable decision and I believe the decision was correct.” Way to stand with a beleaguered U.S. attorney, Rudy! What a wuss.

Read More Hard Guy[

From The LA Times
Editorial

When the Supreme Court in its 2005-06 term handed down unanimous decisions on two controversial subjects — abortion and campaign finance — it seemed possible that newly seated Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., an exponent of “judicial modesty,” would preside over a more collegial and consensus-seeking court.

The prospect of amity, which faded after Samuel A. Alito Jr. replaced the more moderate Sandra Day O’Connor in early 2006, has been definitively dispelled by the court’s 2006-07 term, which ended Friday. Although seven of the nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, they found little to agree on. Instead, they resolved 24 cases by votes of 5 to 4 — up from 11 the prior term. So fractured were the votes that important issues debated by the justices emerged without any majority at all. The most closely watched ruling, on school integration, produced only a muddle of division and half-reasoning.

Not for nothing is a leading textbook about the court titled “Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics.” This term, the winds too often blew in the wrong direction.

By a 5-4 vote, with Alito and Roberts in the majority, the court executed an ominous U-turn on abortion by upholding a federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortions even though it lacked an exception to protect a woman’s health. That same alignment — the four most conservative justices along with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — worked its will to the nation’s detriment in other cases, striking down modest attempts to integrate public schools, weakening a landmark 1969 ruling protecting students’ free speech and taking a narrow view of a law allowing lawsuits alleging sex discrimination.

Read more 5-4

From Think Progress
By Nico

In February, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a piece in The New Yorker revealing that the Bush administration was setting its sights heavily on Iran, planning for a “possible bombing attack“:

Still, the Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran, a process that began last year, at the direction of the President. In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.

On Tuesday, Hersh spoke more on the Bush administration’s focus on Iran at the Campus Progress National Conference. He said that President Bush and Vice President Cheney are ignoring the actual intelligence on Iran. The “intelligence community keeps on saying, ‘There’s no bomb there.’ And Cheney keeps on saying to the young briefing officers, ‘Thank you son, I don’t buy that.’” Hersh added, “George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s wet dream is hitting Iran.”

Watch Video

From Think Progress
By Nico

New evidence bolsters the case that Vice President Cheney himself considers his office to be part of the executive branch (except when he is attempting to avoid accountability and oversight).

Yesterday, ThinkProgress noted Cheney’s claim in 2001 that a congressional probe into his energy task force “would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive branch.” Today, a White House video emerged showing Cheney acknowledging:

It’s really a function of the last 50 years or so that the vice president’s become an important part of the executive branch.

Watch Video

From The Baltimore Sun
Editorial

If the issue of student free speech were not so serious, the U.S. Supreme Court’s unfortunate decision in the case of a high school senior who held up a provocative banner - for which he was suspended by school authorities - could almost be chalked up to a generational misunderstanding. But the overreaction by adult authorities in this case, from school officials to a majority of the high court, has led to a bad precedent for First Amendment rights.

Joseph Frederick, who was an 18-year-old senior in 2002, has admitted that the main reason he and some of his friends created a 14-foot banner that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” and displayed it as the Olympic torch came through their town of Juneau, Alaska, was to attract the attention of television cameras. Mr. Frederick and his fellow students had been excused from classes to watch the torch parade from a public sidewalk across the street from their school.

Although school officials conceded that the banner display did not interfere with classroom work or prompt complaints about drug use, Mr. Frederick was banned from campus for eight days because the principal insisted that the banner violated school policy against public expression that promotes illegal drug use. But Mr. Frederick eventually persuaded a federal appeals court to agree that his First Amendment rights had been violated and that the principal should be liable to him for damages.

Read more Free Speech

From St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By Michael J. Sniffen

The CIA finally showed the public its so-called family jewels Tuesday, but even after 30 years it won’t tell all.

It still won’t tell even as much about the domestic spying scandal of the 1970s as Congress did a generation ago.

The documents — a list of horrors and abuses drawn up in 1973 by CIA officers themselves — set off that scandal. It sullied the reputation of intelligence officers and led to new rules for the CIA, FBI and other spy agencies and new permanent committees in Congress to oversee them.

The CIA released 693 pages of documents about spying on Americans, opening citizens’ mail and plotting to kill foreign leaders, but vast sections were blocked out by agency censors.
Advertisement

As a result, they were far less revealing than the reports issued in the mid-1970s by the three investigations that were given unedited versions of these documents at that time — President Gerald Ford’s Rockefeller Commission, the Senate’s Church committee and the House’s Pike committee.

Read More CIA

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

Zakariya Muhammad Reed was coming back from Canada on June 17 when he was detained again for a couple of hours. This marks the fifth time in the last seven months that he has encountered difficulty.

On May 9, I reported on his troubles at www.progressive.org, “Muslim American Grilled at Border over Religion, Letter to the Editor”.

This time, Reed was asked about that article. On a previous occasion, he was grilled about a letter to the editor he’d written to the Toledo Blade. In that letter, he criticized U.S. support for Israeli policies, as well as Bush’s Iraq War.

Expecting to be hassled by now, Reed decided to cross over from Windsor, Ontario, by way of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. “The detention area is bigger,” he tells me, “so if I’m going to be there for several hours, I’d rather be in the bigger place.”

Sure enough, when he got to the booth, he was not allowed to go through.

“There’s something coming up on your license plate,” the guard said, according to Reed. “It’s a no read.”

The guard took his ID and scanned it.

>Read more Border Security

From The Washington Post
By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker

Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby. The meeting marked “the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up” among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. “The CIA guys said, ‘We’re going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees’” if interrogators confined themselves to humane techniques allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive’s will to resist. The vice president’s office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials.

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden “torture” and permitted use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

A backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of abuse leaked out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to be sharp reversals in courts and Congress — for both Cheney’s claims of executive supremacy and his unyielding defense of what he called “robust interrogation.”

Read more Torture

From The Independent UK
By Daniel Howden

Most people in Britain won’t have noticed. On the supermarket shelves the signs are still subtle. But the onset of a major change will be sitting in front of many people this morning in their breakfast bowl. The price of cereals in this country has jumped by 12 per cent in the past year. And the cost of milk on the global market has leapt by nearly 60 per cent. In short we may be reaching the end of cheap food.

For those of us who have grown up in post-war Britain food prices have gone only one way, and that is down. Sixty years ago an average British family spent more than one-third of its income on food. Today, that figure has dropped to one-tenth. But for the first time in generations agricultural commodity prices are surging with what analysts warn will be unpredictable consequences.

Like any other self-respecting trend this one now has its own name: agflation. Beneath this harmless-sounding piece of jargon - the conflation of agriculture and inflation - lie two main drivers that suggest that cheap food is about to become a thing of the past. Agflation, to those that believe that it is really happening, is an increase in the price of food that occurs as a result of increased demand from human consumption and the diversion of crops into usage as an alternative energy resource.

On the one hand the growing affluence of millions of people in China and India is creating a surge in demand for food - the rising populations are not content with their parents’ diet and demand more meat. On the other, is the use of food crops as a source of energy in place of oil, the so-called bio-fuels boom.

As these two forces combine they are setting off warning bells around the world.

Read more Food Fight