Luckily we get to hear about it on tv

 

More about Amy

 More Than 5,000 Lawyers Sign Letter Opposing Amy Coney Barrett’s SCOTUS Nomination — It is the largest known lawyer opposition letter to a Supreme Court nominee.

When healers harm

From the CCR website:

Despite the health professions’ universally recognized duty to do no harm, doctors and psychologists have played a key role in the U.S. government’s policy of torture in its overseas prisons. They crafted and justified torture tactics, inflicted pain and oversaw abuse and enabled, covered up and turned a blind eye to cruel treatment. Yet, in the face of mounting evidence, government officials, licensing boards and professional associations defend their failure to act by saying “We do not have enough information.”

CCR disagrees. When Healers Harm presents the evidence for everyone, including those in institutional power, to examine.

It is time to hold accountable the healers who have harmed. Accountability is vital to survivors of medical torture and to health professionals, most of whom take seriously their commitment to do no harm. It is also necessary for the rest of us – as patients and members of civil society we have a right to treatment by health professionals who we can trust, and a right to a government that upholds the law.

Those in power have tortured in our name. We have an obligation to show them that America refuses to be a torturing society any longer. Join us in ensuring that those who choose to cover for torturers as a matter of political expediency come to see the pursuit of justice as a political necessity.

As I've said, we want their names. Before they slip unchecked back into our society. We want the names of those who thought torture was a good thing to do.

It's Holy Crap Monday!

Liz Cheney frantically rewrites history to favor her father's actions. GQ takes on Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld made sure it was a crusade for Bush, a holy war.

We do too want an investigation over torture! More pictures of Bush administration's non-torture. Obama can't ignore this. It's all about trying to force a false confession to make a link between al-Qaeda and 9/11.

The latest excuse for torture is the SERE program... which caused great suffering to one young soldier. (The mother's letter is heartbreaking.)

Wish them luck:

A coalition of liberal groups filed petitions Monday seeking disbarment of Bush administration attorneys linked to memos on harsh interrogation techniques of detainees.

The Great Game continues under Obama.

Simon Johnson for the Atlantic:

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

Just how economically stressed out is your community, how many homeowners are now underwater?

Governor Secession runs away.... from seceding.

Just ... hold ... it ... back ...

Until the handoff in January 2009 and Georgie can flee to Paraguay...

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has temporarily stayed a ruling requiring top White House aides to comply with a subpoena issued by Congress about allegedly politically-motivated dismissals of federal attorneys.

The Justice Department has been trying to delay a court decision ordering presidential chief of staff Josh Bolten to provide documents, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers to testify before lawmakers about the firings of nine prosecutors in 2006. Both officials refused to comply with subpoenas, citing executive privilege.

Do you think they have feelings of shame and guilt?

Or is it more just the reaction like cockroaches have of scuttling back into the dark when the light goes on?

I've been having more than a few Washington D.C. ips click on my post of Harper's magazine discussion with Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side. But what I think worries/ scares/ confuses/ angers/ concerns them about the post is when I wrote this:

We want names. We want the names of those in the legal [and medical] profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

We won't let them sink quietly back into American society, becoming the lawyers who do our trusts or the doctors who prescribe pills to our children. They have participated in the torture of prisoners and it has brought shame to our nation and fury and revulsion to its citizens.

We want to know who they are.

Interesting, don't you think? That they might just begin to realize that there is a demand for accountability from those who helped the Bush adminstration break the Constitution, destroy the law, bomb the high road, go for the throat, empty the treasury, gut the Geneva Conventions, lay low our nation's integrity and honor.

If this is what is making loyal Bushies break out in a sweat, I'll say it again:

We want their names.

We want their names.

Harper's magazine talks to Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side. Read it if you want to see where the United States lost its soul: (my bold)

In a series of gripping articles, Jane Mayer has chronicled the Bush Administration’s grim and furtive dealings with torture and has exposed both the individuals within the administration who “made it happen” (a group that starts with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington), the team of psychologists who put together the palette of techniques, and the Fox television program “24,” which was developed to help sell it to the American public. In a new book, The Dark Side, Mayer puts together the major conclusions from her articles and fills in a number of important gaps. Most significantly, we learn the details on the torture techniques and the drama behind the fierce and lingering struggle within the administration over torture, and we learn that many within the administration recognized the potential criminal accountability they faced over these torture tactics and moved frantically to protect themselves from possible future prosecution.

About the doctors who helped the torturers:

A physician was called in for consultation—one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program. (I personally feel that the medical and psychological professionals who have used their skills to further a program designed to cause pain and suffering should be a high priority in terms of accountability. It has long been a ghastly aspect of torture, worldwide, that doctors and other medical professionals often assist. The licensing boards and professional societies are worthless, in my view, if they don’t demand serious investigations of such unethical uses of science.)

We want names. We want the names of those in the medical profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

After interviewing hundreds of sources in and around the Bush White House, I think it is clear that many of the legal steps taken by the so-called “War Council” were less a “New Paradigm,” as Alberto Gonzales dubbed it, than an old political wish list, consisting of grievances that Cheney and his legal adviser, David Addington, had been compiling for decades. Cheney in particular had been chafing at the post-Watergate reforms, and had longed to restore the executive branch powers Nixon had assumed, constituting what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the Imperial Presidency.”

Before September 11, 2001, these extreme political positions would not have stood a change of being instituted—they would never have survived democratic scrutiny. But by September 12, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were extraordinarily empowered. Political opposition evaporated as critics feared being labeled anti-patriotic or worse. It’s a familiar dynamic in American history—not unlike the shameful abridgement of civil liberties represented by FDR’s internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. One of the strongest quotes in the book, I think, comes from Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, former counselor to Secretary of State Condi Rice, and a historian who teaches at the University of Virginia. He suggests in time that America’s descent into torture will be viewed like the internment of the Japanese, because they happened for similar reasons. As he puts it, “Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”

We want names. We want the names of those in the legal profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

We won't let them sink quietly back into American society, becoming the lawyers who do our trusts or the doctors who prescribe pills to our children. They have participated in the torture of prisoners and it has brought shame to our nation and fury and revulsion to its citizens.

We want to know who they are.

Grabbing power wherever they can

Away from those who challenge the Bush adminstration's authority.

Jeralyn at Talk Left:

In another outrageous attempt at grabbing power that does not belong to it, the Bush Administration is now seeking to control which military lawyers get promotions:

The Bush administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House's policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism.

The administration has proposed a regulation requiring "coordination" with politically appointed Pentagon lawyers before any member of the Judge Advocate General corps - the military's 4,000-member uniformed legal force - can be promoted.

In a nutshell,

Under the current system, boards of military officers pick who will join the JAG corps and who will be promoted, while the general counsels' role is limited to reviewing whether the boards followed correct procedures. The proposed rule would impose a new requirement of "coordination" with the general counsels of the services and the Pentagon during the JAG appointment and promotion process.

It's our unitary executive at work again.

Update 12/22: Via Phila of Bouphonia, the plan to politicize JAG promotions is dropped:

An attempt within the Pentagon to politicize promotions for military judge advocates general appears to have been blocked after protests from military lawyers and threats from key lawmakers.

The plan, which called for “coordination” with the civilian general counsels of the services and the Defense Department for the promotion of any JAG officers, had been circulated in the Pentagon since November but ran into a serious roadblock Tuesday when key members of Congress learned about the details.

For promotions to O-6 and below, the proposed policy required coordination with the chief civilian lawyer of each service, the service general counsel. For promotions to flag and general officer rank, the proposal called for coordination with the Defense Department general counsel.

DoD General Counsel William Haynes had planned to hold a meeting this Friday with the service judge advocates general to discuss the proposal, but sources in the Pentagon and in Congress said if a meeting is held at all, it will be to try to heal the wounds the proposal caused.

“This is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard come out of the DoD general counsel,” said Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., an Army Reserve JAG officer and former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on military personnel.

That's a Republican saying it was one of the dumbest ideas.... That's saying a lot!

Vote for one of the good guys...

Glenn Greenwald or Jeralyn Merritt.

Pakistani police attack lawyers

I'll suspend my usual jokes about lawyers to appreciate thousands of these people standing up for the rule of law:

Pakistani police have used batons and tear gas against thousands of lawyers and political activists protesting against the emergency rule imposed by Pervez Musharraf, the president.

The clashes on Monday came ahead of an announcement by Shaukat Aziz, the prime minister, that elections planned for January would go ahead "on schedule".

The United States, and Musharraf's other western allies, have sought reassurances that the national and local assembly elections would take place despite the constitution being suspended on Saturday.

About 1,500 people have been detained in a crackdown on opposition to the president's decision.

Around 2,000 lawyers gathered in the eastern city of Lahore despite police warning them not to violate a ban on rallies across the country.

Hundreds of police entered the city's high court and fired tear gas as they attacked lawyers inside the building.

Several lawyers were wounded when police launched a baton charge, witnesses said.

"Police lobbed more than a dozen tear gas shells at lawyers who had gathered in the high court and then beat them with batons," Sheikh Faisal, a lawyer at the court, told the reporters by telephone.

And from the BBC:

Lawyers' associations across the country said they were calling three days of protests and boycotts of courts.

Media reports, citing police and interior ministry sources, said some 1,500 people had been arrested in the past 48 hours, while many top judges were effectively under house arrest.

The Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami was among the groups targeted.

Its leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, was under arrest, as were hundreds of members, the party said.

Information Minister Tariq Azim called those figures an exaggeration.

He told the BBC that it was up to protesters to remain calm, or deal with the consequences.

"If people take the law into their [own] hands, obviously, they have to be dealt with," he told the World Today.

Pakistani TV news channels, which have huge audiences, are being prevented from broadcasting within the country, and at least one newspaper press was raided by police.

We've seen this coming for months. One more country in the region experiencing a meltdown. I'm sure the neocons are just delighted....

Update: Picture from Reuters:


Civil rights activists (R) scuffle with police during a protest against emergency rule in Islamabad, Pakistan, November 4, 2007. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood

Update: Video of lawyers in Lahore.

Could the Big Surge have anything to do with this?

The White House lawyers up in reaction to the Democrats' November victory.