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POPSItaly Convicts 23 Americans In CIA Terrorist Kidnapping Case 
One of those convicted, former Milan consular official Sabrina De Sousa, accused Congress of turning a blind eye to the entire matter. "No one has investigated the fact that the U.S. government allegedly conducted a rendition of an individual who now walks free and the operation of which was so bungled," she said, speaking through her lawyer Mark Zaid. Despite the convictions capping the nearly three-year Italian trial, several Italian and American defendants – including the two alleged masterminds of the abduction – were acquitted due to either diplomatic immunity or because classified information was stricken by Italy's highest court. The case has been politically charged from the beginning, with attempts to mislead investigators looking into the cleric's disappearance and derail the judicial proceedings once the trial was under way. But the Italian-American relationship, conditioned on such issues as participation in the Afghan campaign, is unlikely to be hurt by the convic
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POPSCrazy Sheriff Joe Arpaio facing FBI investigation for abusing his power by arresting his critics We described Arpaio's incredible thuggery late last year in his dealings with the public, especially those who dare criticize him. An anti-Arpaio group called Maricopa Citizens for Safety Accountability, which formed last year in response to investigative reports and studies demonstrating that Arpaio's insane obsession with illegal immigrants was destroying his office's ability to actually deal with real law enforcement work, began showing up at county board meetings and asking to speak. Arpaio actually sent out his deputies in force to patrol these meetings, and they arrested people for merely applauding Arpaio's critics. If that sounds fascist to you, that's about right -- after all, some of the local neo-Nazis are Arpaio's biggest fans -- and he's been known to return the love.
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POPSDick Cheney's losing his old black magic It's great to watch people step up to smack Cheney down. Retired Gen. Paul Eaton blasted back today, and I couldn't say it any better: "The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it. 2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11. "The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy 'experts' have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. …
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POPSScientist spying for Israel busted by the FBI An affidavit suggests why FBI agents posed as agents of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to conduct the sting operation. From 1998 to 2008, the complaint alleges, Nozette was a technical adviser for a consultant company that was wholly owned by the Israeli government. Nozette was paid about $225,000 over that period, the court papers say. Then, in January of this year, Nozette allegedly traveled to another foreign country with two computer thumb drives and apparently did not return with them. Prosecutors also quote an unnamed colleague of Nozette who said the scientist said that if the U.S. government ever tried to put him in jail for an unrelated criminal offense, he would go to Israel or another foreign country and "tell them everything" he knows. The complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf violated U.S. law. In Jerusalem, Israeli government officials had no immediate comment. The affidavit by FBI agent Leslie Martell s
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POPSBritish High Court rejects U.S./British cover-up of torture evidence Yesterday, in a 38-page decision (.pdf), the Court reversed itself, and ruled that these paragraphs detailing Mohamed's torture should be publicly disclosed. It did so by making clear that, in essence, it simply did not believe that the U.S. would meaningfully reduce intelligence sharing; understood the Obama statements to be made at the request of British officials as a meaning of justifying ongoing concealment; interpreted the Obama administration to say only that disclosure "could" lead to reductions in intelligence-sharing, not that it "would"; and, most of all, that there are vital public interests that outweigh the minimal risk that the U.S. would withhold evidence of a terrorist plot from Britain as punishment for disclosure.
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POPSFox News isn't even pretending anymore The boldest innovator, however, has been Fox News. Since President Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity. Billing itself as “fair and balanced,” Fox has turned itself into what White House communications director Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” Fox openly promotes “Tea Parties” and other political demonstrations; it portrays every perceived White House defeat, such as Chicago’s failure to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, as a victory for something called “Fox Nation.” “Doublethink,” Orwell called it: the ability to “hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” So it is with “Fox Nation” and “fair and balanced.”
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POPSA historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes What made those detainee photographs so important from the start is that they depict brutal abuse well outside of the Abu Ghraib facility and thus reveal to Americans -- and the world -- that America's torture was not, as they've been constantly told, limited to rogue sadists at Abu Ghraib and the waterboarding of three bad guys. Instead, our torture regime was systematic, pervasive, brutal, fatal, and -- becuase it was the by-product of conscious policies set at the highest levels of government -- common across America's "War on Terror" detention regime. These photographs would have documented those vital facts; combated the false denials from torture apologists; fueled the momentum for accountability; and revealed, in graphic and unavoidable terms, what was truly done by America's government. But a Democratic-led Congress, at the urging of a Democratic President, is now taking extraordinary steps -- including a new law which has no purpose other than to suppress evidence of Americ
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POPSApartheid Much 83. Various witnesses and experts informed the Mission of a sharp increase in the use of force by the Israeli security forces against Palestinians in the West Bank from the commencement of the Israeli operations in Gaza (Chapter XIX). A number of protestors were killed by Israeli forces during Palestinian demonstrations, including in support of the Gaza population under attack, following the beginning of the operations, and scores were injured. The level of violence employed in the West Bank during the time of the operation in Gaza, was sustained also after the end of the operation.
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POPSNew Berkeley Law Study Finds Enforcement of Immigration Laws Led to Racial Profiling The new report, “The CAP Effect: Racial Profiling in the ICE Criminal Alien Program,” was released today by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity (Warren Institute) at UC Berkeley School of Law (Berkeley Law). “It was clearly a fishing expedition. Police cast a wide net to arrest anyone who looked Hispanic for any minor violation,” said report co-author Aarti Kohli, immigration policy expert at Berkeley Law’s Warren Institute. “The Hispanic community suspected racial profiling as the root cause of the increase in arrests. Our report backs that up.”
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POPSInsurance Company Must Pay $10 Million For Revoking Policy Of Teen With HIV The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court's verdict against Fortis Insurance, now known as Assurant. The trial jury had awarded the former college student, Jerome Mitchell, $15 million in punitive damages; the Supreme Court reduced that amount by $5 million. Mitchell learned that he had HIV when, while heading to college, he donated blood. Fortis then rescinded his coverage, citing what turned out to be an erroneous note from a nurse in his medical records that indicated that he might have been diagnosed prior to his obtaining his insurance policy. Before the cancellation of the policy, an underwriter working for Fortis wrote to a committee considering whether or not to rescind his policy: "Technically, we do not have the results of the HIV tests. This is the only entry in the medical records regarding HIV status. Is it sufficient?" The underwriter's concerns were ignored and the rescission went forward. In the ruling, Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal wrote: "We find ampl
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POPSBagram: The sham of closing Guantanamo Yesterday, the Obama DOJ -- as expected -- filed a legal brief (.pdf) which adopted the arguments originally made by the Bush DOJ to insist that detainees whom they abduct from around the world and then ship to Bagram (rather than Guantanamo) lack any constitutional rights whatsoever, including habeas review. The Obama administration is appealing from a decision (.pdf) by Bush-43-appointed District Court Judge John Bates which, applying Boumediene, held that detainees at Bagram who are originally detained outside of Afghanistan have the right to habeas review (Afghan citizens detained in Afghanistan have none, he found). In other words, after Obama praised Boumediene as "defending the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy," he's now attempting to make a complete mockery of that decision by insisting that it is inapplicable as long as he decides to ship detainees from, say, Thailand to Bagram rather than Guantanamo. Obama apparently sees "our core values" as nothing more th
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POPSJudge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses The judge focused much of his criticism on the fact that the fine in the case would be paid by the bank’s shareholders, who were the ones that were supposed to have been injured by the lack of disclosure. “It is quite something else for the very management that is accused of having lied to its shareholders to determine how much of those victims’ money should be used to make the case against the management go away,” the judge wrote.
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POPSStudy: Bush Tax Cuts Cost More Than Twice As Much As Dems' Health-Care Bill In contrast, President Bush and his allies in Congress never even attempted to replace the revenue lost as a result of their enormous tax cuts. The Bush tax cuts were deficit-financed, which increased the national debt and resulted in greater interest payments on that debt, as already explained. These figures make clear that costs cannot be the real concern of lawmakers who oppose the House health care legislation and yet supported the Bush tax cuts. Their position seems to be that showering benefits on the wealthiest five percent of taxpayers and leaving the bill for future generations is preferable to making health care available for all at a much lower cost and paying that cost up front. That demonstrates a different set of priorities than most Americans have, but it doesn’t demonstrate much concern about costs.
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POPSMajor ruling against Ashcroft highlights evils of preventive detention The principal legal issue strictly resolved by the court here is somewhat narrow and legalistic. A political official has absolute immunity from lawsuits based on decisions made in a prosecutorial capacity (e.g., whether to indict or prosecute someone), but not for law enforcement decisions (e.g., whether to arrest or detain someone). You can't ever sue a prosecutor for deciding to prosecute you, but you can sue someone who arrests you if they acted illegally and in clear violation of your legal rights. The Ninth Circuit ruled that where, as here, there is credible evidence that the real reason an official ordered someone detained as a material witness (normally a prosecutorial act) was to arrest them, that is a law enforcement act, not a prosecutorial one, and he is therefore not entitled to absolute immunity from lawsuits if he violated the law when doing so. Hence, this lawsuit against Ashcroft personally -- alleging that he ordered Muslims detained in clear violation of their l
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POPSJustice Dept. to Recharge Enforcement of Civil Rights To bolster a unit that has been battered by heavy turnover and a scandal over politically tinged hiring under the Bush administration, the Obama White House has also proposed a hiring spree that would swell the ranks of several hundred civil rights lawyers with more than 50 additional lawyers, a significant increase for a relatively small but powerful division of the government.
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POPSNew CIA Docs Detail Brutal "Extraordinary Rendition" Process All of these practices are carefully engineered to facilitate the interrogation process. Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation are used as standard preparatory steps. It then details the standard "corrective techniques:" these are a series of physical assaults labeled with innocuous titles like insult slap, abdominal slap, facial hold and attention grasp. "Coercive techniques" used include: walling (slamming a prisoner's head against the wall, with some protective measures to avoid severe injuries), water dousing, the use of the stress position (known to the inquisition as the strapado, to the Germans in World War II as Pfahlbinden), wall standing (referred to by the NKVD and KGB as stoika) and cramped confinement. Because of substantial redactions, it seems unlikely that this list is complete. None of this information is surprising. In fact it all tallies perfectly with the description of the renditions program that can be derived from the report prepared by the Intern
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POPSJustice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Abuse Cases With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda. The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand. The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.
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POPSWhy Israeli Jew Uri Davis joined Fatah to save Palestine So what does Davis believe, and why? His father was a British Jew who met his mother, a Czech, in British Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1930s, where they married in 1939, four years before his birth. While his mother escaped the transports to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, many in her family did not. It is a familiar story in Israel. But the lesson that Davis learnt from it was different from the vast majority of Jews who concluded that never again could Jews depend on others to guarantee their security from persecution. "An important part of the education that I received from my parents," Davis recalled last week, "was never to generalise. To beware of every sentence that begins with 'all'. It was not 'all' Germans who killed my mother's family. It was some Nazis." Another distinction was emphasised by his mother. "If she heard the suggestion of vengeance, she would be horrified. She sought justice. One of the biggest problems addressing a Zionist audience is that the distinction
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POPSReport: Bush mulled sending troops into Buffalo And who supported this daft idea? The usual suspects, of course! "According to the Times, Cheney and other Bush aides said an Oct. 23, 2001, Justice Department memo gave broad presidential authority that allowed Bush to use the domestic use of the military against al-Qaida if it was justified on the grounds of national security, rather than law enforcement. Among those arguing for the military use besides Cheney were his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials, the Times reported."
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POPSReport: Bush program extended beyond wiretapping The report also questions the legal advice used by President Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo at the Justice Department. The report suggests Yoo ignored an explicit provision in the FISA law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.
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POPSSupreme Court makes age-bias suits harder to win The dissenters, led by the court's senior justice, John Paul Stevens, described the ruling as "especially irresponsible" and "an unabashed display of judicial lawmaking." Stevens seemed particularly upset that the court had decided a different issue than it had announced when it accepted the case last year. "Unfortunately, the majority's inattention to prudential court practices is matched by its utter disregard of our precedent and Congress' intent," he wrote.
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