Brad Manning and the US Third World Regime

A senior United Nations representative on torture, Juan Mendez, issued a rare reprimand to the US government on Monday for failing to allow him to meet in private Bradley Manning, the American soldier held in a military prison accused of being the WikiLeaks source. It is the kind of censure that the UN normally reserves for authoritarian regimes around the world.

Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said: "I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr Manning."

[...]

Mendez, who has been investigating complaints about [Manning's] treatment since before Christmas, said the US department of defence would not allow him to make an "official" visit, only a "private" one. An "official" visit would mean he meets Manning without a guard present. A "private" visit means with a guard and anything the prisoner says could be used in the planned court-martial.

Mendez pointed out that his mandate was to conduct unmonitored visits, and that had been the practice in at least 18 countries over the last six years.

[...]

He said: "My request for a private, confidential and unsupervised interview with Manning is not onerous: for my part, a monitored conversation would not comply with the practices that my mandate applies in every country and detention centre visited."

  UK Guardian

Late last week, Manning’s counsel, David Coombs, documented that the Quantio brig was failing to follows its own rules, as it denied "official visit" authorization to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a representative of Amnesty International, and Juan Mendez, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Torture formally investigating Manning’s detention conditions.

[...]

The Guardian reports this morning, a letter signed by "more than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars" that "includes leading figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names from other academic fields" -- featuring "Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law"; who "taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign"; and "joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago" -- not only denounces Manning's detention but also the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner's personal responsibility for it.

  Glenn Greenwald

The list of professors who have signed the protest letter includes leading figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names from other academic fields. Among them are Bill Clinton's former labour secretary Robert Reich, President Theodore Roosevelt's great-great-grandson Kermit Roosevelt, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union Norman Dorsen and the writer Kwame Anthony Appiah.

[...]

The protest letter, published in the New York Review of Books, was written by two distinguished law professors, Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard. They claim Manning's reported treatment is a violation of the US constitution, specifically the eighth amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and the fifth amendment that prevents punishment without trial.

In a stinging rebuke to Obama, they say "he was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency".

[...]

[Manning] has been held in the military brig since last July, charged with multiple counts relating to the leaking of thousands of embassy cables and other secret documents to the WikiLeaks website.

Under the terms of his detention, he is kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, checked every five minutes under a so-called "prevention of injury order" and stripped naked at night apart from a smock.

[...]

As commander in chief, Obama is ultimately responsible for Manning's treatment at the hands of his military jailers. In his only comments on the matter so far, Obama has insisted that the way the soldier was being detained was "appropriate and meets our basic standards".

  UK Guardian

I think he means our “base” standards.

They Don't Believe in Science Anyway

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.

  Raw Story

And just how do we go about decreasing the fear side and increasing the complex understanding side? Or is that hopeless?

So There!

The son of a Wisconsin lobbyist [Jerry Deschane] whose firm heavily donated to Gov. Scott Walker (R) has unexpectedly quit his appointed post just days after media reports criticized the governor for picking him over candidates far more qualified for the lavishly paid state job.

[...]

His qualifications: dropping out of college, working for a few Republicans, working for a lobbyist shop and getting busted a couple times for DUI. Other candidates for the job, who sported much weightier qualifications, were not even interviewed.

[...]

Walker had previously called Deschane's son a "natural fit" for the job, but the Sentinel noted that after its initial report that Walker's administration claimed it had only just heard of their staffing agency's decision.

[...]

Brian Deschane, 27, was initially given a job that earned $64,728-a-year, but within two months was bumped up to a position that earned over $81,000. He was demoted earlier this week, after Gov. Walker came under heavy rhetorical fire in the media for the hire.

Raw Story

So he quit. And don’t expect any donations from him, Walker.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Well, That's Settled

Now that you know that the government is not going to shut down (phew!) but that there will be some painful cuts for people (phew! bankers aren't people, so they're safe), I will tell you why I didn't post anything during all the drama of the possibility of a government shut down (gasp!)

It's because there was never any threat of that. It was always and only a matter of how far the Republicans would get the Democrats to bend, and that was never very difficult to do. The only issue was in the bargaining - not in the possibility of an actual shutdown.

We are so addicted to drama.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Take Your Pick

From al Jazeera:

Isn't it great that we're not at war?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

With Friends Like This...

An apparent NATO airstrike slammed into a rebel combat convoy Thursday, killing at least five fighters and sharply boosting anger among anti-government forces after the second bungled mission in a week blamed on the military alliance.

  Yahoo

I Want to Believe

Sign of the Times

Yeah, Wisconsin, I hear ya. But it's the way this country rolls.

Downhill to Hell.

It Pays to Remember

Raw Story makes a short list of Obama's broken promises.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

It's Sunday

Ten foreign UN workers were killed on Friday in an attack on the UN headquarters in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif by demonstrators protesting at the burning of the Koran by a US pastor, police told AFP.

[...]

Afghanistan had condemned the "disrespectful and abhorrent" burning of the Koran by evangelical preacher Pastor Wayne Sapp in a Florida church, calling it an effort to incite tension between religions.

  Raw Story

The Rapture can't come soon enough for me. And while God's at it, can he please take his radical Islamic children, too?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

April Fools

Yesterday, I posted about Obama signing a presidential directive to allow the CIA to conduct secret operations in Libya and scoffed at the idea that he thinks he controls the CIA, saying: “as if they aren’t already there.”

Today, I read in Justin Raimondo’s post that:

[S]omeone in the Obama administration leaked the news that the CIA has had its boots on Libyan ground for at least the past three weeks.

Now I am convinced that those who have been claiming Obama to be naïve are indeed right. He apparently just found out from the leak that the CIA were already there and, by signing that silly directive, attempted to give the impression that he, Benevolent Emperor, gave them permission. What a douche.

[T]his is transnational progressivism in action. This is what [writer Andrew] Sullivan and his fellow fools voted for, and now they’re getting it. All the whining about how its "fantastically contrary to what [Obama] campaigned on" is yet more evidence of cultic blindness.

[...]

Of course Libya is crawling with CIA, as well as British, French, and Italian spooks, and what they’re gathering is a lot more than "intelligence": they’re out there collecting potential "leaders" among the rebels, choosing up sides, determining who will go on the payroll and who will be quietly sidelined or eliminated.

No shit. How could anyone who wasn’t born yesterday think otherwise? I’d be more surprised to find out that there is somewhere – anywhere – that the CIA isn’t.

And, back to Obama’s desire to look and be imperial:

The "Arab Spring" that was previously being celebrated and closely watched the world over has now been co-opted and transformed into something else entirely. Faced with the prospect of losing its Middle Eastern allies to a wave of uprisings, the Americans have decided to go with the flow, so to speak, and try to control it as best they can.

Not “the Americans,” Justin. The Empire.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

The Emperor Is the Law

[Recently], Hillary Clinton told the House of Representatives that "the White House would forge ahead with military action in Libya even if Congress passed a resolution constraining the mission." [...] As Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman noted, Clinton was not relying on the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (WPR); to the contrary, her position is that the Obama administration has the power to wage war in violation even of the permissive dictates of that Resolution.

Glenn Greenwald

Which is, after all, asserting the idea he has long championed - that the President has ultimate power.

I defy anyone to identify any differences between the administration's view of its own authority -- that it has the right to ignore Congressional restrictions on its war powers -- and the crux of Bush radicalism as expressed in the once-controversial memos by John Yoo and the Bush DOJ. There is none. [...] If anything, one could argue that [Bush counsel John] Yoo's theory of unilateral war-making was more reasonable, as it was at least tied to an actual attack on the U.S.: the 9/11 attacks. Here, the Obama administration is arrogating unto the President the unilateral, unrestrained right to start wars in all circumstances, whether or not the U.S. is attacked.

But what Clinton's stated view really harkens back to is the Iran-contra scandal, when the Reagan administration funded the Nicaraguan contras despite an express Congressional prohibition on doing so, and then took the position -- when exposed -- that Congress has no power to restrict its national security decisions. That position was pioneered in 1987 by then GOP Rep. Dick Cheney.

[...]

[L]eave aside the fact that both Obama and Clinton as Senators and presidential candidates insisted exactly the opposite when they specifically argued that Congress could legally require Bush to obtain Congressional approval before bombing Iran and generally that Presidents have no power to start wars without a vote from Congress. It was true during the Bush years and it is true now that this is an absolute distortion of the "Commander-in-Chief" power of Article II.

[...]

[O]nce a government engages long enough or pervasively enough in a certain form of criminality or corruption, the citizenry is trained to accept it and collectively ceases to resist it, even learns to embrace it. to wage war in violation even of the permissive dictates of that Resolution. And, of course, the Obama administration has indeed involved the U.S. in a major, risky war, in a country that has neither attacked us nor threatened to, without even a pretense of Congressional approval or any form of democratic consent.

Yes, and that’s pretty much where we are. Let me specifically stress a point that Greenwald makes in this article, because it appears to not be very clear to many people:

The "Commander-in-Chief" power means nothing more than, once a war starts, the President is the top General with the power to decide how it is tactically prosecuted.

[...]

Alexander Hamilton, the founder most enthusiastic of executive power [emphasized in constructing the Constitution that the] British King could start wars on his own; the American President cannot, as that power is reserved exclusively for Congress.

[...]

The one and only safeguard against tyranny is that political leaders are subjected to the constraints of the Constitution and law (we're a nation of laws or a nation of men, said Adams: you must choose).

[...]

It may be common, and it may produce good outcomes, and it may be a longstanding problem, but there's no question that Obama's commencement of this war without Congressional approval, and especially Hillary Clinton's announcement that Congress has no power to restrict the President in any way, are acts of pure imperial lawlessness.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.