Tag: DOJ

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Only three of the 763 “sneak-and-peek” requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases, according to a July 2009 report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Sixty-five percent were drug cases.

HuffingtonPost.com

Bold text added by the diarist

    You must be frigging kidding me.

    A partial transcript, commentary and more below the fold.

Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s ongoing letter writing campaign for accountability to the rule of law for the apparent Bush Administration State Sponsored Torture program. For those playing our home game, the way this works is every Monday the Dog writes a letter to decision makers urging them to take action under our legal obligations, both Federal and International, to investigate and where evidence of criminality exists prosecute those who ordered, those who justified and those who carried out torture in the name of the United States of America. You get involved by either cut and pasting the letter to the links the Dog provides, or writing your own letter based on this weeks ideas.  

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

The DOJ site has a poll widget to vote on the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate CIA torture. The link http://www.ticklethewire.com/

A hat tip to emptyhweel for catching this one.

    You know how Obama’s DOJ claims that we can’t see Cheney’s interview with Patrick Fitzgerald because it’s privileged? Well, Dick Cheney’s own lawyer already leaked the so-called privileged content three years ago.

A lawyer familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, told NEWSWEEK that the “president declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out.” But Bush “didn’t get into how it would be done. He was not involved in selecting Scooter Libby or Judy Miller.” Bush made the decision to put out the NIE material in late June, when the press was beginning to raise questions about the WMD but before Wilson published his op-ed piece. [my emphasis]

firedoglake.com

     I interpret this as another Bush “Git R Done” moment where he hands off to Cheney and goes back to playing Guitar Hero.

    I guess that puts the lid on the fact that Libby fell on the grenade for Cheney. Good thing Bush the War Criminal gave Libby a commuted sentence 5 minutes later.

   Yes, these idiots managed to leak the priveledged interview about the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. If they weren’t so genuinely incompetent I would say that Bush/Cheney was trying to be stupid.

Crossposted at http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Crossposted at http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

    Representative Barney Frank has introduced H.R. 2835, a bill which is intended to reschedule marijuana for medical use and end federal interference in state laws.

    To provide for the medical use of marijuana in accordance with the laws of the various States.

govtrack.us

   Moving the Overton window happens one step at a time. We need to take bigger steps. This bill does not address the problems inherit in the drug war or the marijuana prohibition issue. If you want a national drug policy that makes sense, this bill does not address the problem, and right now our national drug policy is a big part of THE problem.

    The bill, which was co-sponsored by 13 bipartisan Members of Congress at the time of introduction, would change federal policy on medical marijuana in a number of ways. Specifically, the Act would change marijuana from a Schedule I drug, classified as having no medical value, to a Schedule II drug, which would recognize marijuana’s medical efficacy and create a regulatory framework for the FDA to begin a drug approval process for marijuana. The act would also prevent interference by the federal government in any local or state run medical marijuana program.

commondreams.org

    What seems like a valiant effort to protect medical marijuana users is not quite the problem. Of course I want medical marijuana users to be able to get the medicine they are prescribed, but that is not the Problem.

As an Illinois state senator, Obama sponsored a bill to require the police to videotape interrogations in capital crime cases.  Illinois was the first state to do this.

Now, the Obama administration is urging the US Supreme Court to overturn a landmark decision that stops police from questioning suspects unless they have a lawyer present.  Nineteen former judges and prosecutors, including Larry Thompson (ex-deputy attorney general) and Williams Sessions (former FBI director), have urged the Supreme Court to leave the 1986 ruling intact.

The Michigan vs Jackson ruling in 1986 established that, if a defendants have a lawyer or have asked for one to be present, police may not interview them until the lawyer is present.  Any such questioning cannot be used in court even if the suspect agrees to waive his right to a lawyer because he would have made that decision without legal counsel, said the Supreme Court.  

The US Justice Department is arguing that the existing rule is unnecessary and outdated.  The sixth amendment of the US constitution protects the right of criminal suspects to be “represented by counsel”, but the Obama regime argues that this merely means to “protect the adversary process” in a criminal trial.  

The Justice Department, in a brief signed by Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, said the 1986 decision “serves no real purpose” and offers only “meagre benefits”.

Critics argue that the 1986 decision is important to protect vulnerable defendants such as the mentally disabled, poor or juveniles who could be easily swayed by the police.

“Your right to assistance of counsel can be undermined if somebody on the other side who is much more sophisticated than you are comes and talks to you and asks for information,” said Sidney Rosdeitcher, a New York lawyer who advises the Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University.

So according to the Obama administration, the criminal rights of the mentally disabled, poor and juvenilles are too meager to be bothered with, and the Bush administration’s crimes are too important to look back on in anger or with thoughts of revenge.  

Where the hell are their high priced consultants, their values, their heads?  There is no way this administration can sell taking away rights and justice from America’s most vulnerable while protecting torturers and fraudulent banks.  If this isn’t morally and politically bankrupt on all counts, I don’t know what is.  

Somebody really needs to let President Obama in on the screwed up messages “the Obama administration” is sending out in his name, and Democrats better remember that even the Iraq war got a honey moon.  If Obama and the Democrats don’t deliver the change they promised, they will lose to it; and this country can’t afford to have them blow another opportunity to enact the progressive change that the people and the country so urgently need.  Democrats can either be the hero and keep power for 30 – 40 years, or they can be the goat and concede power in 4 years.    

I want to believe, but he keeps pissing me off.  

tip of the hat and cross posted here

From Armando at Talkleft Monday evening:

Martin “Marty” S. Lederman Photo: Georgetown Law

Lederman Joining Obama Administration:

From Ben Smith [at Politico]:

   A Georgetown source forwards over an email from that school’s administration, reporting that Professor Marty Lederman’s class will be canceled — because he’s joining the Obama administration.

   Lederman, another former Clinton Office of Legal Counsel lawyer, is perhaps the most prominent of several high-profile opponents of the Bush Administration’s executive power claims joining Obama, a mark that he intends not just to change but to aggressively reverse Bush’s moves on subjects like torture. . . . Lederman has been . . . an early and vocal critic of torture, and has suggested Bush Administration officials have committed specific crimes in that regard.

For those unfamiliar with him…

Martin “Marty” S. Lederman [until today was] an Associate Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches various courses in constitutional law, and seminars on separation of powers and executive branch lawyering. He regularly contributes to the weblogs SCOTUSblog and Balkinization, including on matters relating to Executive power, detention, interrogation, civil liberties, and torture. Lederman was an Attorney Advisor in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel from 1994 to 2002

Marty Lederman blogs with Jack Balkin, at Balkinization.

In a Balkanization post July 08, 2007, Lederman grouped all of his, Mark Graber’s, Stephen Griffin’s, Scott Horton’s, Sandy Levinson’s, David Luban’s, Brian Tamanaha’s, Jack Balkin’s and a few others posts “on the complex of issues raised by torture, interrogation, detention, war powers, Executive authority, the Department of Justice, and the Office of Legal Counsel” together under the heading The Anti-Torture Memos: Balkinization Posts on Torture, Interrogation, Detention, War Powers, Executive Authority, DOJ and OLC

There are many, almost six hundred, posts in that Balkinization category, but a quick scan of the titles will give you a good indication of Marty’s feelings and leanings on the subjects of torture and applicable “rule of law”, and his very strong and vocal criticisms of torture by the Bush administration.