Retssag mod Guantanamo-bagmænd på vej

Ikke i USA, men i Spanien. Men det kan blive alvorligt nok for de pågældende, hvis de rejser uden for USAs grænser. Sagens bagmand er Baltasar Garzón, hvis retssag mod Chiles diktator Pinochet førte til hans anholdelse i London for mange år siden.

The Observer skriver:

The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon’s general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.

Court documents say that, without their legal advice in a series of internal administration memos, “it would have been impossible to structure a legal framework that supported what happened [in Guantánamo]”.

If Garzón decided to go further and issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled outside the US. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.

Link: Six Bush officials accused of torture

Update: Politiken skriver nu også om sagen, der ifølge dem også kunne komme til at omfatte selveste Dick Cheney.

‘Kids for cash’

Dette er et af de mest absurde eksempler på konsekvenserne af den omsiggribende fængselskultur i uSA, det land i verden, som indespærrer den største procentdel af sin befolkning:

Ejeren af et ungdomsfængsel i Pennsylvania har i årevis bestukket dommere til at idømme flere og længere fængselsstraffe i sager mod børn og unge, end de ellers ville have gjort – den ene af dommerne har nu tilstået at have modtaget 2,6 millioner dollars over de sidste mange år.

The Guardian skriver:

Hillary Transue was 14 when she carried out her prank. She built a hoax MySpace page in which she posed as the vice-principal of her school, poking fun at her strictness. At the bottom of the page she added a disclaimer just to make sure everyone knew it was a joke. “When you find this I hope you have a sense of humour,” she wrote.

Humour is not in abundance, it seems, in Luzerne County, northern Pennsylvania. In January 2007 Transue was charged with harassment. She was called before the juvenile court in Wilkes-Barre, an old coal town about 20 miles from her home.

Less than a minute into the hearing the gavel came down. “Adjudicated delinquent!” the judge proclaimed, and sentenced her to three months in a juvenile detention centre. Hillary, who hadn’t even presented her side of the story, was handcuffed and led away. But her mother, Laurene, protested to the local law centre, setting in train a process that would uncover one of the most egregious violations of children’s rights in US legal history.

Last month the judge involved, Mark Ciavarella, and the presiding judge of the juvenile court, Michael Conahan, pleaded guilty to having accepted $2.6m (£1.8m) from the co-owner and builder of a private detention centre where children aged from 10 to 17 were locked up.

Skandalen kaldes “kids for cash” og har betydet, at man nu genoptager sagerne mod mere end 2000 børn og unge, som Ciavarella har sendt i fængsel.

Et usædvanligt giftigt eksempel på, hvad der sker, når man blander private økonomiske interesser ind i retshåndhævelsen – og på, hvad der sker, når man insisterer på, at “stramninger” og indespærring er løsningen på alle vore kriminalitetsproblemer.

Link: Juvenille court judges accepted $2.6m for sending children to detention centre

Heltemodige amerikanske betjente uskadeliggør livsfarlig, samfundstruende 15-årig pige

Politiet i King County, Washington syntes af en eller anden grund ikke, at denne video, der dokumenterer ordensmagtens heltedåd, burde være kommet til offentlighedens kendskab:

“We had argued strenuously that the videotape released to the media this morning not be released because it does not tell the whole story of the incident,” attorney Anne Bremner said in a statement.

“As we argued to the judge, it will inflame public opinion and will severely impact the deputy’s right to a fair trial.”

The video shows Schene and Brunner as they escorted the girl into the holding cell. Schene had asked her to remove her basketball shoes, and, as she slipped out of her left shoe, she appeared to kick it at Schene.

Schene then lunged through the door and kicked her, striking either her stomach or upper thigh area, court documents say. He pushed her against a corner wall before flinging her to the floor by her hair. He then squatted down on her and made “two overhead strikes,” although it’s unclear where the blows landed.

The detective who reviewed the video said it appeared Schene and Brunner had the girl under control when Schene struck her. Schene, who is 6 feet 2 and weighs 195 pounds, did not explain his action to investigators, court documents say.

Link: Beating caught on police video (via Boing Boing)

Obamas afghanske stuvning

Nogle mennesker har større tillid til Obamas evner som fornyer end andre. Den arabisk-amerikanske vittighedstegner Khalil Bendib hører ikke til de mest imponerede, som det vil fremgå.

Og Obamas planer om en større optrapning i Afghanistan lader da også en del tilbage at ønske. En tilbagetrækning, for eksempel. Det bedste, USA og Vesten i det hele taget på nuværende tidspunkt kan gøre for en fredelig udvikling i Afghanistan er at trække sig ud på en ordentlig måde, men så hurtigt som muligt.

Alt andet dækker over i bedste fald misforståede, gode intentioner, i værste over gusten neokolonialisme. USA bragte Taleban til fald i 2001 og har nu, næsten ni år efter, intet fornuftigt at bidrage med. Ikke militært, i hvert fald. Hvis Obama var klog, ville han lave en exit plan i stedet.

Kongresmedlem til overbelånte husejere: BZ jeres egne huse

Kongresmedlem Marcy Kaptur fra Toledo, Ohio opfordrer boligejere, der står overfor udsmidelse og tvangsauktion til at blive og BZ’e deres eget hus i protest.

“I’m saying to them possession is 99 percent of the law; you stay in your house,” Miss Kaptur said yesterday, continuing a crusade she started several weeks ago in Congress and CNN picked up Thursday night.

She said she believes that many so-called predatory and subprime loans – those made to borrowers who did not qualify for a conventional mortgage – may have been illegal.

She urged homeowners not to panic and leave their home just because they receive a foreclosure notice from their lender, and she said they should demand that the mortgage-holder produce a mortgage audit. “I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave,” she said during a speech in Congress.

Og hvorfor ikke? Lånene er blevet delt ud med en sådan rundhåndethed, at det reelt har handlet om, hvem man kunne bondefange til at skrive under, så man kunne få flere giftige pantebreve at handle med og overbelåne i en evig dans om den gyldne cirkel – indtil musikken holdt op med at spille.

Opfordringen være hermed givet videre til overbelånte, inkasso- og tvangsauktionstruede danskere.

Via Exiled Online, der hylder Kaptur som “hero of the depression”: Although it’s more fun to trash the villains and suckers who dominate our dying empire, if the rare hero appears and says something courageous and decent, then it becomes our professional duty to salute her.

Ny meningsmåling: Folk vil ikke tolerere tortur, uanset hvad

I USA, ganske vist (I Danmark er jeg ikke sikker på, jeg har lyst til at kende svaret). Men alligevel. Glenn Greenwald:

One of the most common and most corrosive aspects of our political discourse is the endless assertions — based on nothing — about what “Americans believe.”  It is exceedingly conventional wisdom that Americans generally view the world through the prism of Jack Bauer and therefore want our government to torture, want Guantanamo kept opened, and do not want suspected Terrorists to be tried in civilian courts inside the U.S.  It is even more commonly asserted that Americans do not want, and even further, would never tolerate, criminal investigations into the various crimes of Bush officials.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday negates all of those beliefs.  Here was the question that was asked about torture — note that it’s phrased in the most pro-torture manner possible, because it is grounded in the ludicrous, 24-clichéd “ticking time bomb” excuse that is the most commonly used argument by torture advocates:

Q. Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?

By a wide margin —  58-40% — Americans say that torture should never be used, no matter the circumstances.

Altså: Et stort flertal af amerikanerne mener, at tortur ikke må og kan anvendes. Under. Nogen. Omstændigheder.

George W. Bush og hans slæng har altså ikke haft den opbakning til at tilsidesætte menneskerettighederne i Irak-krigen og “krigen mod terror”, som ellers ofte tages for givet.

Link: New poll on torture and investigations negates Beltway conventional wisdom

Forstå situationen i Gaza – en amerikansk analogi

Professor og aktivist Randall Kuhn tager sig tid til at forklare, hvad Israels besættelse og invasion af Gaza egentlig betyder, sådan oversat til amerikansk. Om man efter endt læsning vil forsvare den heroiske israelske indsats med de resulterende drab af mere end 1000 mænd, kvinder og børn, må enhver jo selv dømme.
Fra Washington Times:

In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: “Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico.”

[…]

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.

What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy? Sounds pretty awful, huh? I may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I’m Jewish and the scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza. But this analogy is just getting started.

What if the United Nations kept San Diego’s discarded minorities in crowded, festering camps in Tijuana for 19 years? Then, the United States invaded Mexico, occupied Tijuana and began to build large housing developments in Tijuana where only whites could live.

And what if the United States built a network of highways connecting American citizens of Tijuana to the United States? And checkpoints, not just between Mexico and the United States but also around every neighborhood of Tijuana? What if we required every Tijuana resident, refugee or native, to show an ID card to the U.S. military on demand? What if thousands of Tijuana residents lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their children, their sense of self worth to this occupation? Would you be surprised to hear of a protest movement in Tijuana that sometimes became violent and hateful? Okay, now for the unbelievable part.

Think about what would happen if, after expelling all of the minorities from San Diego to Tijuana and subjecting them to 40 years of brutal military occupation, we just left Tijuana, removing all the white settlers and the soldiers? Only instead of giving them their freedom, we built a 20-foot tall electrified wall around Tijuana? Not just on the sides bordering San Diego, but on all the Mexico crossings as well. What if we set up 50-foot high watchtowers with machine gun batteries, and told them that if they stood within 100 yards of this wall we would shoot them dead on sight? And four out of every five days we kept every single one of those border crossings closed, not even allowing food, clothing, or medicine to arrive. And we patrolled their air space with our state-of-the-art fighter jets but didn’t allow them so much as a crop duster. And we patrolled their waters with destroyers and submarines, but didn’t even allow them to fish.

Would you be at all surprised to hear that these resistance groups in Tijuana, even after having been “freed” from their occupation but starved half to death, kept on firing rockets at the United States? Probably not. But you may be surprised to learn that the majority of people in Tijuana never picked up a rocket, or a gun, or a weapon of any kind.

Via Akram’s Razor.

53 fredsaktivister registreret som ‘terrorister’

Ikke i Danmark, men i Maryland – men slemt nok.

Som vi læser på Boing Boing:

Saying “I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government,” former Maryland state police superintendent Thomas E. Hutchins authorized the infiltration of several anti-war and anti-death-penalty nonviolent protest groups, then added their members to the national terrorism database and the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database. In all, 53 citizens were thus included (that we know of — it’d be naive to think that Maryland is the only state where the police abuse their powers). The police admit that there was “no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime” by those classified as terrorists.

I det mindste kan det stadig få nogen op af stolen, derovre:

Stunned senators pressed Sheridan to apologize to the activists for the spying, assailed in an independent review last week as “overreaching” by law enforcement officials who were oblivious to their violation of the activists’ rights of free expression and association. The letter, obtained by The Washington Post, does not apologize but admits that the state police have “no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime” by those classified as terrorists.

Hutchins told the committee it was not accurate to describe the program as spying. “I doubt anyone who has used that term has ever met a spy,” he told the committee.

“What John Walker did is spying,” Hutchins said, referring to John Walker Jr., a communications specialist for the U.S. Navy convicted of selling secrets to the Soviet Union. Hutchins said the intelligence agents, whose logs were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland as part of a lawsuit, were monitoring “open public meetings.” His officers sought a “situational awareness” of the potential for disruption as death penalty opponents prepared to protest the executions of two men on death row, Hutchins said.

I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government,” he said.

Herhjemme er vi ikke så langt endnu, men helt ærligt … hvor længe?

Link:Md. Police Put Activists’ Names On Terror Lists (via Boing Boing).

Krakkede investeringsfirmaer blev fritaget for kontrol

Firma: Jeg fylder lommen uden din intervention - Staten: Men hvis du taber, giver jeg

SEC svarer vel nærmest til det danske Børstilsyn, og SEC har altså bevidst vendt øjnene væk fra de største firmaers excesser:

As we learn this morning via Julie Satow of the NY Sun, special exemptions from the SEC are in large part responsible for the huge build up in financial sector leverage over the past 4 years — as well as the massive current unwind

Satow interviews the above quoted former SEC director, and he spits out the blunt truth: The current excess leverage now unwinding was the result of a purposeful SEC exemption given to five firms.

You read that right — the events of the past year are not a mere accident, but are the results of a conscious and willful SEC decision to allow these firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that, in the past 30 years, had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1.

Instead, the 2004 exemption — given only to 5 firms — allowed them to lever up 30 and even 40 to 1.

Who were the five that received this special exemption? You won’t be surprised to learn that they were Goldman, Merrill, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley.

As Mr. Pickard points out that “The proof is in the pudding — three of the five broker-dealers have blown up.”

So while the SEC runs around reinstating short selling rules, and clueless pension fund managers mindlessly point to the wrong issue, we learn that it was the SEC who was in large part responsible for the reckless leverage that led to the current crisis.

You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

Lad de store komme til fadet – skatteyderne tager skraldet, og fanden tager de bagerste. Sand risikovilje: Hvis jeg vinder, rydder jeg bordet, hvis jeg taber, kan vi dele i porten. Heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose, som Paul Krugman siger.

En passende mindesten over Bush-æraen. (Via Boing Boing)